Because Hearts Can't Stop Seeing
by Kiera777
Summary: "But the fog was treacherous, showing lights where there were none, letting him see what he wanted to see- like the mist in a crystal ball. Things that were not real- the boy beneath the coldness, the girl beneath the madness. Regulus and Bellatrix Black. And he, the blind fool. Frank Longbottom." For the prompt: 'Fighting a battle in the fog has dangerous, dangerous pitfalls.'
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: So…..a couple of you may be surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed that I've chosen to put up another story instead of updating CoH. If you read this though, I hope you'll understand why- I started CoH years ago and my writing has morphed and grown greatly since then, and I don't think I'll be able to update it again unless I give it a major revamp. Meanwhile though, do read this story (It's already complete and I'll be uploading the remaining parts soon, so yay!) and review, I'd greatly appreciate it **** . Threeshot, initially written for HP Drizzle 2014 for the prompt: "Fighting a battle in the fog has dangerous, dangerous pitfalls".**

_Regulus Arcturus Black_

_Born December 3__rd__, 1961_

_Died September, 1979_

_It was I who found your secret._

"Can't get a tie straight?"

The silk felt crumpled, creased under his too-short, too-stubby, too inadequate fingers. They stopped tugging and the tie fell, fluttering dispiritedly to a standstill against his pygmy chest, the tip brushing his belt loops, still too long.

Hollow clicks against solid oak came closer, and his heart rate spiked. His face was wiped clean- well schooled. But a nerve jumped in his throat, of everyone else, why her why her why...

Cool, precise fingers hooked into his shoulders and turned. He raised his chin, against the tug of gravity and shame, and looked into glittering black eyes.

"Reggie." Bella cooed, and Regulus winced as he felt red-tipped talons scrape against the shoulder of his robes- impeccable, pure-strained grey silk. "Little purebloods need to learn to knot their own tie. Should sister Bella teach you?"

_And sister Bella needs to learn to stop wibbling in that ridiculous voice. _Regulus stood ramrod straight, eyes fixed somewhere above the three inch taller shoulder of his cousin, inescapably aware of her nails tracing across his non-existent Adam's apple, watching the pendulum swing in the antique grandfather clock unblinkingly. The gold swung in almost hypnotising motion, back and forth, back and forth, and a rat skittered out of the shadows, pattering past the wooden case of the clock before vanishing in a cloud of dust again. Kreacher wouldn't be spared if- when, Mother finally caught sight of it. He'd probably smile like a loon even when he was being punished, the gap obviously wide in his large, worn teeth, loincloth hanging off discoloured skin and protruding bones.

"All done." The invasively light touch vanished, her fingers withdrawing from his throat, and his chest released, purging itself of stale air. Bella stepped back, and her teeth-tipped smile loomed over him- like everything did over his eight year old frame. She was fifteen, and she glowed in the darkness of the Grimmauld Place hallway, like everything Black inevitably did; luminous skin and moon-shadowed hair and dark eyes the best juxtaposition of dark and light there ever was.

Sirius had started showing it too, the baby fat weaning out bit by bit to reveal the bone structure beneath, stormy dark brows and grey eyes too pale and old for a ten year old. Even now, dressed in a stiff-creased white collar shirt that was half untucked, navy robes thrown on haphazardly and slouched on the doorframe, waiting for them beyond the dark; he still looked more Black than the short, spindly, wide-eyed boy Regulus could still glimpse in the looking glass he'd been trying to fix his tie in. The Black genes seemed to have entirely skipped him, as they always did- and Regulus felt a gnawing feeling lap at the corner of his heart, the beginning of a feeling that would grow to be too familiar in the years to come.

"Now now." Bella clapped her hands, two short, whip-like movements, snapping his attention back to her- and that was so Bella, unable to stand still until all attention was tight and bound firmly around her; and his eight year old mind crowed and gloried in its apparent maturity, clutching the fact to his chest with two hands in a motion that again would soon grow familiar, drawing comfort from the undeniable stupidity of his older siblings. They would always be stupider. "The wait must be killing them."

Regulus nodded once, a neutral, acquiescing, meaningless motion, and hung behind as she swept out from the hallway, tracing her flamboyant footsteps with quieter, subdued ones. Sirius scowled at him when they crossed, straightening as his fists remained buried in his trouser pockets, and Regulus internally scoffed again, growing stronger, even as his brother moodily fell into step behind him.

Idiots.

* * *

><p><em>Idiots.<em>

The prongs of his fork poked at the horrid shellfish thing, a slimy blob coated in lemon yellow sauce that smelled faintly of coconut. He hated coconut.

Something colourless squirted out of the shell as he stabbed it again, spraying the napkin tucked into his collar -like a _kid- _with innumerable foul smelling droplets. Mother cast him a swift, disapproving look over her shoulder, not breaking her line of conversation with Lady Selwyn once; and Regulus glowered and tucked his chin to his neck, feeling hot colour crawl in ugly blotches to his skin. He always ate neatly and efficiently, that was the one thing the governess always appreciated about him, _they _were the ones who always lazed and loitered and played around with their food, but...

A loud laugh, punctuated by a snicker and short grunt of pain as if someone had gotten elbowed in the ribs floated over from the corner, and Regulus restrained himself from trying to snap the fork in half.

People looked over, of course they did, mostly imperious stares and disapproving looks, but the boys creating a ruckus seemed to not mind at all; continuing on with that disgusting snickering. Black haired, wicked eyed both, pointing at people and stifling undignified sniggers into their palms, pushing and shoving one another over- they looked like twins, brothers akin, separate from everybody else in their own charmed world.

And Regulus didn't care, he really _didn't_, Sirius could go on sniggering and making a fool out of himself with that James Potter- honestly no sense of dignity and family pride _at all_, not a whit of it- all he liked and Regulus wouldn't give two Knuts about it. Mother didn't even deem the Potters worthwhile company, self-righteous arses the lot of them, Regulus had been introduced to many more who'd serve as better, much more suitable company (none of them his age who'd attend Hogwarts with him of course, there never was), but Rosier was just as awkwardly prodding his shellfish next to him- and Sirius never even had been _introduced _to James for Salazar's sake, and there they were cosseted up in the corner, laughing away like the bestest friends in the entire world and it was disgusting was what it was, disgusting and...and.._wrong _and it made Regulus want to stab his shellfish in the eye socket and make the little black ball pop out like Sirius had done to his favourite toy unicorn.

So he didn't even understand what he was doing, not really, when a boy in a high-collared robe and swishy cloak crossed his field of view; he was simply aware of his feet hitting the floor, the chair creaking as it was pushed back, and the absolutely vile purple trainers that he could glimpse beneath the hem of the trailing cloak; he would have remembered them surely, had he been introduced to the boy. The boy walked across the pillared hallway, barely changing his trajectory at all to navigate between other guests, apparently all alone and blase and unconcerned- and fast, Regulus thought with no small measure of annoyance- but just as he'd been wishing the boy would stop already, those lanky legs came to a standstill and wintry brown eyes swiveled around to fixate on him.

Much later, when Regulus would cease to be eight and gain a more mature appreciation of the English language, he would reflect on the oddity of that expression, because brown wasn't a very winter colour at all. Sirius' eyes were grey, which was as close to slush and snow as it got, but brighter and more alive like that of a storm. These eyes were as brown as they came, yet not very reminiscent of chocolate at all. They were more like to the weathered bark of a tree, robbed bare of leaves- unobtrusive, firm. Winter wasn't always about the snowflakes and the stark landscapes and cold and drama- it was sometimes the quiet hush of nature resting, the peace, life sleeping below ground. It was about potential.

The boy stared at him. No, stared was too intrusive a word, he simply...looked, and Regulus cursed his flush-prone, non-existent Black genes and tried to concentrate on the trainers.

"Regulus Arcturus Black." He bit out, sheer arrogance coating the terror beneath. He stuck a hand out, abruptly, imperiously, and let it hang in the air.

The boy looked at him. He looked at the seat Regulus had been occupying across the hall. Then he looked at the distance between the two points, eyes taking an abnormally long time to trace the entire path. He looked till Regulus felt fit to crawl out of his own skin, and said. "Okay."

"What's...your name?" Regulus forced out through gritted teeth, hand returning to clench fitfully at his side, resisting the urge to tug at a stray thread from his cuff tickling the insides of his wrist. Kreacher really was such a useless elf, he'd have to tell Mother that the critter was getting too old to take care of the entire Black laundry on his own. What if someone saw his sleeve?

The boy blinked lashes short enough to be invisible, and looked to be in contemplation. "Frank Longbottom." He said, after a moment's pause.

Sirius would probably have snickered at the last name, the uneducated cretin, but Regulus could only raise an internal eyebrow in comprehension- ah, no wonder, wasn't Longbottom the woman in the horrid hats that Mother glared at in every social gathering? The boy seemed to have inherited his mother's terrible taste in clothing, Regulus' eyes flicked down to the trainers again- but the Longbottoms had impeccable blood, no one of inferior breed would be allowed to even lick off the plates of this household.

"What did you want?" The boy asked.

A deathly silence descended upon the two of them.

His heart rate had picked up, Regulus realised with growing panic and rage, like the blacksmith's bellows pounding away in the core of the flame, going faster and faster till it would end up crashing out of his sternum. His knees were knocking against each other, his little fingers quivering, his skin broken out in prickles and flaming up- and he'd never felt more wretched in his life. It was remarkable how often that happened to him.

"You...you." He'd stuttered. Blacks never stuttered. "You have a spot. On your collar."

The boy looked at him, then at the empty seat across the hall again. Across being the key word. Regulus didn't want to disappear into the ground, he wanted to destroy everything around him so that they wouldn't look at him anymore.

"I...thought I should tell you." His voice grappled, a thin, reedy thing, with the silence. No, _no_, this wasn't happening. "This is a very p...prestigious gathering. Lady...Rosier might feel offended. I thought I'd tell you and you'd be properly grateful for saving your pride in a public situation and we'd talk and I'd introduce you to Perez..."

His throat closed off. Too late. Too bloody late.

The boy wasn't looking at the seat anymore, only at Regulus, and Salazar, he didn't know if that was an improvement, he didn't quite care at the moment, being too preoccupied with working down the quivers and letting his hands hang less...uselessly. He did notice however, when the boy reached up, flicked an invisible piece of lint off his collar, and nod. "Thanks." Then he turned and walked away.

_Idiot. _Regulus thought, watching the cloak lift over the bright purple with every step away. He probably couldn't speak in more than two syllables, prehistoric caveman, hugging and dancing in circles with Muggles in his free time. He and Sirius and James should be best friends, Regulus vengefully decided, grunting and casting gormless looks at each other for hours altogether. Honestly, he didn't even know why he'd gotten up from his seat, even though the shellfish was odious.

Still, when he dropped back down on the hardbacked chair, inclined his head for the umpteenth time at Rosier and resumed drawing patterns with the yellow sauce on the porcelain white plates; he remembered that nod and the unabashed acceptance of the spot that never was and Frank Longbottom.

It really was such a funny last name.

* * *

><p>Rosier wasn't just an incompetent fool who couldn't properly de-shell his- oh Salazar had he tired of this word, even though it had been years since that menace of a party- shellfish, but also a berk. He was the third, (first and second positions going to Sirius and Sirius, respectively) of the many berks that Regulus would come to meet, and in hindsight, he couldn't quite decide if the most annoying thing about that night had been coming to be acquainted with this shit, or the coconut aftertaste that still seemed to linger on his palate after all this time.<p>

Rosier was a first class berk, and the undeniable proof of his berk-ness lay in the fact that he was two years elder, three and half inches taller and weighed at least a pound more than Regulus, and was currently looming over him in the Charms corridor, having crowded him into the corner. Really, Regulus thought with distaste, he understood survival of the fittest and succinct disposal by feeding on weaker snakes in a pit, but, as Rosier's canines gleamed wildly behind his sneering lips, dripping with drool in the morning light- was it necessary to take it so literally?

"Fork over the Galleons." Rosier growled.

Regulus raised pale, long-knuckled hands to the light of the windowpane. "Don't have my purse on me."

Rosier seemed genuinely taken aback at the reply, at the thought that Regulus might simply not have money on him after so much hard work in finally being able to corner him, rather than offended. Regulus still felt the flare of self-blame and irritation, it was his own lack of alertness rather than any spectacular planning on Rosier's part that enabled the buffoon to finally get him alone after a month into the new school year.

"You're a firstie." Rosier growled again, and Regulus would have covered a yawn of boredom at the repetition with his fingers, except his self-preservation skills hadn't yet died a torturous death. "A firstie."

"Which is why I can't Charm my buttons to pure gold right now and hand them over." Regulus smiled thinly back.

Rosier immediately scowled back and okay, maybe it had been a mistake treating a Rosier like a Crabbe, except they really were all the same, weren't they? The elder boy's wand dug into his chin and Regulus suppressed a wince- Rosier rolled out an almost passable smirk in response. "Sure you don't just lack some motivation, Reggie?"

_Posturing and smart arse dialogues. Lovely. _It was almost dispiriting how faint and resigned that inner voice sounded. Also, he _despised _Bella for spreading that nickname through Slytherin house like the plague.

Rosier's lips parted, probably around some new, inventive curse, his brother's year was almost famed for using hexes that most people had never even heard of- and Regulus would never admit that his eyes had closed in preparation, but a voice cut across them. "Excuse me."

Regulus' eyes flew open- it didn't happen, it never happened, blinking was a normal phenomenon- and Rosier turned in place, apparently incensed at being interrupted. It dwindled down soon though, and Regulus noted that the fist inches from his chin was now white and clenched tightly around its wand of wood. He tried to lift himself surreptitiously on his toes, peer over Rosier's shoulder to see who the person who had inspired such an interesting response was, but the moron's goddamned build obscured everything.

"Longbottom." Rosier intoned flatly.

That was one question answered.

It shedded ice through Regulus' veins, his lips compressing to a fine line. Of course, of all people that could have rescued him, it had to be a Gryffindor. The only Gryffindor apart from his brother and his thrice-damned friends that he'd been taking careful pains to avoid, additionally. For a Black, he'd certainly spent a lot of his upcoming reign at Hogwarts hiding from people.

It was a weak thought, and he quenched it as quickly as it came, grinding his heel down on the feeling till it spluttered helplessly and died, and Regulus took a second to feel triumph. Rosier was still occupied with watching Longbottom defensively, Regulus didn't care to analyse why he bothered, he could probably eviscerate the Gryffindor with a thumb and a pinky- but Rosier seemed to disagree, for when Longbottom inclined his head an inch and asked, "Is there a problem here?", he contented himself with almost shaking his fist in the taller boy's face and then turning to walk away, glaring mutinously all the while. A good portion of those glares were directed at Regulus, and he nodded agreeably - _yes yes, you'll be 'back for me later' and all that rot _- and Rosier stalked away, rather like a tamed, defanged snake.

Regulus repressed the flare of irritation, looked like dueling skill was contagious for all of his brother's House mates (no, he hadn't been shocked by Sirius' Sorting, he'd had two complete years to get over any remainder feelings over the same - a wizard could always hope after all - and his Mother had been an... had let herself succumb to unrealistic expectations if she had let herself believe that Sirius had even a whit of Slytherin in him). Longbottom didn't look much different from his eleven year old avatar, he was dressed quite normally in school robes, but it took only a second for Regulus' eyes to catch on the lavender badge shaped like a fleur-de-lis pinned to the front of his scarlet tie. It looked atrocious.

Longbottom still hadn't left. That had to be remedied immediately. The words exited his lips, so dryly, sparsely contemptuous. "Talking to your Housemates in the corridors qualifies as a crime, then?"

Longbottom, clearly, didn't get social cues at all. He lifted his shoulder in a half shrug, lips curving up. "Wouldn't know. I'm not on the patrol squad."

Regulus' mouth curled, nostrils barely stopping themselves from flaring. "Why did you come parading all the way on your ivory steed, then?"

"You have a spot." Longbottom said. "On your collar." Then he smiled as if he fancied himself the wittiest person in the world and pivoted on his heel, the flagstones echoing as his footsteps moved away.

Of course, when Regulus returned to his dorms, he discovered there actually was a blood fleck against his pristine white collar, probably from where Rosier had made his nose bleed earlier this morning- but that was neither here nor there.

* * *

><p>Hogwarts wasn't... exactly how Regulus had pictured it.<p>

'Too much bicep-flexing and not nearly enough grey matter to go around' was how Severus had rather adequately put it. Sure, Regulus had expected it out of the multitudes, humans were still animals caught in that primitive thought process of dominance and submission, of challenging those around you and backing down before the biggest horns, the loudest hiss, the sharpest claws. Regulus acknowledged it- who didn't want power? - but he hadn't expected the game, especially among the hand picked of Salazar Slytherin to be so... antediluvian. Crude.

It really was all about brawn, about the hard shoulder rammed into your own in the snake's pit, about whether you shoved back or not, about whether you ducked your eyes or glared back, about whether your fist and wand could back up the fire, about who could bluff the loudest - a graceless, grunting, primordial assertion of masculinity, two rams headbutting it out instead of the silver tongued hiss and strike of snakes. Even the girls had their own catfights, someone or the other made to strip in the common room or reduced to tears in the toilets by a scathing word every other month. It was why Severus had five times the brains of Potter and his friends and yet was pushed around and jeered at by his Housemates- all because he'd been thrown off a bucking broomstick.

Regulus was afforded respect because of his last name. Because of his blood, his father, Bella...fuck, even Sirius. Not himself, because he didn't seek to assert his alpha male status in every room he entered like a swine in heat. His sole utility was to solve the Arithmantic problems of those with enough survival skill to cling on to the biggest armchair close to the fire that week. Then the hierarchy would collapse again, the fights begin, the dusts rise...and Regulus would meld back into the shadows.

The knowledge stung him. It stung him like a thousand devils, grated under his skin when someone would incline his head mockingly to 'Lord Black' and he knew they could just as easily spit at his face. He wanted nothing to do with this...metaphorical flashing of 'whose is bigger' and yet...he wanted to rule it all.

His dormmates were no better. Barty had been pinned a second Bella the moment he'd wiped his thumb across a sniveling Mary Macdonald's cheek and licked the salty liquid off his skin; but of course, with far less class. Nott was a stooge. Rabastan was little less than magical muscle- all power, no finesse. And hell be damned but Regulus had never quite managed to recall the name of the fourth one anyway.

As for the others...Narcissa could be so much, had always been Regulus' favourite; yet she remained content to giggle into champagne flutes and flutter on Lucius Malfoy's arm, her Black pride seeing no greater ambition than to be reduced to a trophy wife. He could almost resent Malfoy for the latter, but...the Prefect was smoother than elderflower wine, commanding attention with little more than a whisper, ice-mettled steel eyes wiped clean of all perceived weaknesses and vices, delicate inflections of venom well backed by viper strike of wand. He...provoked in Regulus something as paltry and essential as hope. If one ruler could break the mold, why not one more?

Bur Lucius, defying all sane rhyme and reason had picked Severus for his protege; and that rejected the latter for Regulus too- if not for the cardinal sin of being chosen over a Black, then for being a halfblood while doing it: the reek of Muggle would not be concealed by any amount of scathing humour or black-wearing. Lucius might saunter around with eyes closed and nostrils pinched shut, pretending it didn't matter- but Regulus had bred true to his blood. His beliefs were written in it, by it, fate drenched in coppery tang and sealed in scarlet- trying to remove them as useful as going after a man's knee with a chainsaw- possible but never fruitful.

Somehow, the stories with which he'd been reared, a Black's entitlement to nothing but the best...somehow, his life wasn't fitting into the picture frame designed by his parents and their parents before him. Wasn't turning out exactly like how he'd taken it for granted to be. Somehow, that crest on his shirt pocket, the silver and green twining through his scarf: wasn't anything like the stories.

Glory was a prettier word in a book. Not half as elusive. In real life, even Purebloods had to earn their own.

* * *

><p>He'd never hated red more in his entire life.<p>

The berries twinkled in the glimmering light cast by the torches, flames mounted on stone brackets running throughout the stone walls; deceptively round, rich, ripe looking things nestled in bunches of dark green, serrated leaves. They looked just like any other sprig of holly fastened to the ceiling with a Permanent Sticking Charm, except of course the entire school had seen the Marauders fussing over it (they christened themselves of course, Regulus would recognise his elder brother's delightful brand of creativity anywhere), and he'd been _blind _enough to walk right in. If the prospect of being 'pranked' by Sirius didn't make his throat tighten in shame, Regulus might have accepted whatever donkey ears or pink hair or other juvenile tricks his brother and friends had dreamed up for the 'fine holiday spirit', as just punishment for his foolishness.

His palms were starting to stick, sweat clogging his pores- he could hear a constant murmur moving down the corridors, growing louder and louder by the second, the rustling cloth and smattered footsteps indications of a rapidly approaching crowd. But his feet couldn't move an inch, or rather wouldn't, the spell signature clearly indicated it was motion-triggered, he was trapped here, a helpless figure stranded in the middle of the hallway under a sprig of holly, free for anyone to come across and laugh and point at. His toes curled into the soles, nails digging into the soft leather, eyes glancing frantically up, then side to side, searching wildly for an escape- the entire school would have to pass this way after dinner, the _entire school_ would be here to witness his humiliation at the hands of his own fucking brother, his skin was stretched too tight over his body, hot enough to singe the wool of his robes, the footsteps drew closer-

And something crashed into him and Regulus' world swung off its axis, his eyes rolling back into his head to see the ceiling zoom before his eyes- and he landed on his elbow, his tailbone coming into swift, unrelenting contact with the flagstones of the floor, a sharp, searing pain lancing up his right arm, and his teeth bit through his lip to halt the sudden onslaught of moisture in his eyes. Pale eyes flew up to the offender, teeth coming loose from the mottled skin, vitriol just waiting on the tongue to lash out, and the first members of the student crowd turned around the corner of the hallway- and both of these stood still and gaped at the spectacle of Frank Longbottom hunched under a lone sprig of holly glowing bright green.

Regulus' startled eyes scoped over that face: it was still unmarred, nose straight, forehead high and broad, thick russet locks scattered aimlessly over the neck, hiding the ears, brown eyes widening slowly before scrunching down upon themselves. The tall-ish figure hunched further, and a decisive rip echoed through the now-packed hallway, the rip of a seam joining two pieces of cloth: and a furry thing emerged from the Gryffindor's behind, wriggling unseemly before growing, growing and sprouting into a long...thing, brown and furred and brushing the ceiling.

Sirius was a cruel-minded bastard, was one part of the jumbled mess of thoughts crammed in Regulus' head, as his eyes and that of hundred others fixated in shock on the monkey's tail waving through the hallway. The picture flashed before his eyes with nauseous vividity- him in the place of Longbottom, straightening his knees and taking a step forward only to stagger to the left, balance caught off by the extra appendage. The first smatter of laughter begun in the crowd, the Slytherins of course, and Regulus watched Longbottom's normally assured stride reduce to a stumbling imitation of a baby learning to walk- and his eyes recoiled at the possible images of the indignity that had brushed so close by, the pride of a Black almost blown to smithereens.

He picked himself, part by part off the floor, inching along the stone wall, hand pressing down unconsciously to smooth out the creases in his cloak, invisible to the crowd even as Longbottom's lips opened in a startled monkey's screech, and the laughter grew louder. Sirius had entered the hallway now, Regulus could see his expressive hands dart back and forth as they motioned to Potter to the fore of the crowd, grey eyes widening for a second as they took in the Gryffindor a year their senior who'd become victim to their prank, lips pulling back to a smile as they parted to deliver what was inevitably a mocking, _funny _joke on the sight, because Sirius didn't care where his laughter came from, as long as it was his.

But there wasn't the time, and Regulus' eyes widened to replicate his brother's as Longbottom pulled his shoulders back and broke into an outright run. He was headed straight to Sirius- Regulus' mind turned, was he about to plow a well-deserving fist into that face?- but _jumped_, inches away from the Black heir, and that long, brown tail which seemed so grossly embarrassing and out of place flicked up and curled around the topmost beam of the ceiling connecting and supporting the pillars, propelling the boy up into the air with the movement.

Several mouths parted in a gasp, Longbottom smiled and reached upward with a hand- and the rest after that was a flurry of movement. It was hopelessly, undeniably, the very essential of primate- this slinging from beam to beam by hand and tail as if loping from one branch to the other of trees in a jungle: but yet not, not this seamless, if not graceful then certainly effortless leaps and vaults through the resistance-less air. In one second, Longbottom pulled himself up by virtue of that very extra appendage, knees locking around the beam- then swung upside down, dark hair covering his eyes, plucking out a paper flower from a Hufflepuff's hair: and the laughter increased, somehow within the breath of seconds flawlessly converted from mocking to mirthful.

Though almost impossible, something else besides this spectacle caught at the corner of Regulus' vision, and his eyes flickered to the right to see a flash of white as Lupin stood unseemingly at the side of his friends, tucking his wand back into his sleeve- and above them Frank Longbottom's mouth opened into a laugh instead of a monkey's shriek, and in the shabbily dressed, halfblood's amber eyes Regulus could glimpse the faint glimmer of envy. Not for the tail that had been Charmed by they themselves, not even for the appreciation of the crowd, but... Regulus swerved his eyes back to ceiling. For the same reason his chest was twisting into itself, a reason he couldn't put into words.

With a final somersault Longbottom landed on his feet, a metre away from Regulus. But there was none of the posturing he'd come to expect after the displays of these Gryffindors: Longbottom's hand darted up into that thick hair and scratched, chin cocking to the side, brows clouding together in the parody of a classic ape act- and the students' laughter mounted in delight. Then wood-coloured eyes were upon him.

"There's no place for humiliation in humility." After all those clown-like antics, the lack of a smile seemed incongruous on Longbottom's face. He turned, and Regulus watched him walk away again, not completely steady, the fabric of the robes bunched awkwardly on the protrusion of his tail.

Yes. Those words would do nicely.

* * *

><p>"Fucking Bellatrix." Frank said, then dropped down heavily on the floor.<p>

Regulus directed a lazy eye to the side, then let his head fall back on his arms again, cold and numbed from the lack of blood flow, propped against stone. Cold, hard, sore-ing stone, not the perfectly comfortable goose down of his dorm bed, or the leather padding of his common room couch, or even the logical wooden back of a chair. All courtesy one brown-eyed Gryffindor Prefect in whose own words: 'your Pureblood, skinny, dainty arse can do without silk mattresses one night in a week, thank you very much.'

Okay, maybe not those exact words. But Regulus _knew _what that quirked brow and faintly teasing glimmer in the eye meant, dammit.

So stone and Butterbeer it was (Frank was a teetotaler. Naturally.) under the cold starlight every Wednesday, watching the huge, wide heavens spangled with celestial bodies stretch out before their eyes, feeling insignificant. Well at least, that's what Regulus did- though not admitted quite so bluntly to himself. He had no idea what sort of fluff resided in Gryffindor brains. Even one who was his...

"Best friend." Frank said out loud, eyes locked up high, almost black in the darkness. "Wouldn't burn your tongue to say it."

"Let me guess." Regulus' tone was flat, all sharp consonants and punctuated syllables, compared to Frank's own easily loping words. Try as he might, the following sentence was still a lovely exercise in drollness. "There's a little furrow over my brows every time I think of sickly sweet, suitably sappy things?"

"No." Frank said. "I am a Legilimens."

If the action hadn't been so proletarian, Regulus would have snorted. Maybe he'd finally taught the idiot something about the finer points of sarcasm.

Two beats of silence.

The sound of his empty glass clattering to the floor was loud enough to wake the dead. His back jerked up, palms coming to press against the cold floor to maintain balance and he stared. In sheer, utter shock.

Frank shrugged. "My mother is Augusta Longbottom."

His hand stung like a bitch in the aftermath, but the thwack upside the head and Frank's watering eyes was sufficient recompense. "Incompetent oaf."

"Self-entitled twit." Frank replied without missing a beat, and rubbed the back of his head gingerly. Regulus almost despised him for not taking that gaping opening where it was, and retorting that it was this incompetent oaf that had learned one of the most complex Mind Arts; not the thirteen straight 'Outstanding's Black.

But this was Frank. The boy who complained that his straight hair was starting to curl at the ends, who gifted Regulus a bouquet of violets on his birthday that his brother didn't bother to remember, who was like a boat rocking gently on the waves, slow and steady and unchangeable, almost steering you to sleep with its comforting motions- before falling into a whirl of rapids that turned and tossed you about and sprung something like _this _on you. Unpredictable, undefined: after all this time. This was Frank, who would always conjure up an imaginary spot on his collar if it meant Regulus could breathe easier. Of course he wouldn't.

Regulus settled back into the floor, feeling around for the patch of stone he'd managed to warm for a minute before giving it up for lost and holding in the hiss behind his teeth as the slabs leeched all traces of heat from his back and thighs. His head clunked back, chin rising, grey irises seeking a constellation-lit night. "So what did Fucking Bellatrix do this time?"

"She exists." Frank parsed out, a little tightly, and in spite of the words, sounded nothing like Potter.

"Rather aggravatingly too, at that." Allowing the words to drop from his tongue, like stones rolling off a cliff that could never ever be withdrawn, was part liberating and all way petrifying- again, not admitted quite so bluntly to himself. Mother's voice still crawled down his spine after all this time..._ Family loyalty, above everything, always...Blacks do not badmouth each other in public..._but then he'd recall a Great Horned owl winging its way across the Great Hall, dropping a bright red, smoking at the edges envelope before a white-faced Sirius..._BLOOD TRAITOR! FILTH! DISGRACE TO THE FAMILY!_...and he'd shake it off, and draw his cloak tighter around himself. "Its amazing how existing can be such an affront to the natural sensibilities."

A faint smile flittered over Frank's face, almost as if he knew what it had cost Regulus to pull out those words, regardless of how entirely and without reservation he meant them- and Regulus scowled, pulling up his Occlumency shields. Blasted twat. Frank for his part, folded up a knee, propped his right arm on it and dropped his face on his sleeve, sounding entirely too run-down for the aftermath of a normal 'preparatory session' for the Auror screening tests coming July. Regulus had to strain his ears to catch the next words, muffled into the cotton cuff as it were, and didn't know why he bothered making the effort.

"Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder." Said the breathing mass of hair and sleeve, and presumably, a Frank behind it. "Its such a bloody _sham._"

That it was, Regulus agreed silently, but it probably wasn't helpful at all to mention it out loud. Bellatrix Black, the new 'teaching assistant' of Defense Against the Dark Arts. There was something so inherently, hysterically awful about it that Regulus was tempted to express amusement, and released a sound doing just that a second later, in spite of it being Not Helpful At All. (Regardless of apparent 'thawing' that must come as a side-effect of befriending a Gryffindor, he was allowed his moments. Or a day. Or two. Or an entire lifetime really, but Frank wasn't allowed to complain since he was the one who'd taken all the 'best friend'-ship upon himself in the first place.) Honestly though, it was like the entire student and staff population didn't know she was head of recruiting, which...they probably didn't- but you didn't allow Bellatrix Black near children on principal. Regulus was a 'smarmy, Slytherin, ice-cold prick' but even he knew that.

(Not like he understood it though. Children were nasty, sniveling snots who should be borne only for the sake of propagating society, and should be locked up the second the pureblood socials were over. Preferably in a sound proofed room.)

Next to him, Frank sighed into his cotton sleeve.

But he was getting diverted, and the truly interesting part here had been the tidbit Frank had revealed about himself. Being aforesaid smarmy, Slytherin, ice-cold prick, Regulus let his eyes flick over, and actually rest, on the silver outline of the seventeen year old boy next to him, which said boy had to know was a danger sign, after all this while. "Are you..." Regulus paused, with the most impeccably delicateness. "ah..._uneasy_, in the dark then?"

Despite all attempts to the contrary, his voice wasn't absolutely wiped clean of emotion. Which in Black-speak, (true Black-speak, not the Sirius blood traitor kind), which Frank was a skilled interpreter of, equated to delighted.

Regulus let his lips fall back into a sigh. Well, he did deserve points for effort.

"No need to sound so bloody happy about it." Frank sounded resigned rather than resentful, then bent lower to tug at his shoelace, making the two ends of equal length. It was a betraying gesture: even if arrogant would probably be the second last word ever used to describe Frank (cruel and untrustworthy tied for last. Maybe silly too.) he still was never one to...well, he unfortunately stressed over exams like any other common student, and appropriately apprehensive before sweat-inducing situations but... he never seemed like he truly doubted his ability to get through, somehow. He was inexplicably immune to the adolescent habit of resorting to dramatics, and exaggerating situations, and making problems appear bigger than they seemed. All mountains would dwindle away before the unstoppable force of nature that was Frank Longbottom's lets-just-get-on-with-it smile. He was Lord and Master of the chicken game. He was not egoistic, or bent on getting his way, or even particularly talented. He would simply not swerve. Ever.

Considering all of the above, it was quite justified that Regulus should raise his brows in his best do-go-on expression. Frank shook his head from side to side, raising his gaze to the heavens in defeat, but did not swerve. "I don't like not knowing what's around me."

"Monsters under the bed?" Regulus inquired, with the greatest sympathy.

"If I took offense to that line of talk," Frank began amiably. "I might start mentioning your obsession with image, and hypersensitivity to respect and shame."

And imaginary spots were all very well, but Frank was a bed of rapids that hardly did what it was commanded to do. That had been mentioned before, yes?

Regulus leaned back till his spine was curved against the wall, eyes fixed motionlessly above, lips flattening into a bland smile. His exterior was a carving in stone, in perfect contradiction to the gnawing, restless, bitterly contracting interior. It didn't take much to set it off these days.

Several seconds of silence weighed heavily by, trying to hold on with grasping fingers, trying to stay- but pushed away by the quiet. The shadow of an owl winging past fleeted across the window pane, casting shadow for a brief moment, erasing the outline. Regulus could still see Frank scrabble at the crack between two cemented flagstones with his thumb nail, dragging it back and forth in a listlessly scraping motion. He held it up, and picked at it with his index, trying to take out the dust that had undoubtedly filtered into the tiny space between corny skin and keratin. Then he stretched across the gap and prodded Regulus in the head, a few centimetres beside the eye.

"Its stupid." He said. "Do you know what's in here?"

Regulus raised his eyes to Frank's own, convinced beyond argument that this degree of unimpressedness could surely not be conveyed by a single look. Also, that was quite some nerve accusing _him _to be stupid.

"You're not stupid, your thoughts are." Frank replied without blinking an eye. "For someone with staggering levels of IQ."

And that made it three, over four long years of friendship. Regulus would allow one more Muggle reference, only, before severing ties with him completely.

"You're a theoretical genius." Frank continued, apparently undisturbed by approaching destruction of best friend-ship. "If not for the power issues and...also, issues with wands-"

"Unsatisfactory spellwork." Regulus supplied, smiling frigidly.

"Shoddy spellwork." Frank corrected, and went on as if nothing was demeaning about that at all. "You would be one of the most skilled wizards to pass through these halls. I've been in the same House with Sirius for years, Regulus, and his brain doesn't hold a _candle _to yours."

Regulus exhaled, inadequate chest strung up tightly, tongue sharpened. "As flattering as this exercise in fluffing up my self-esteem is-"

"I was freaked out when I first met you." Frank delivered, and Regulus couldn't not be silenced. "I freaked out at watching an adult look through an eight-year old's eyes. Eight year olds think about ice cream, Regulus, and maybe messing themselves up in the mud, and particularly intelligent ones might even think about a novel or two; but they don't _look _the way you did- like people decades your senior were beneath your feet, and rightly so. You see the world through I eyes I can't begin to imagine, for a time longer than I can begin to contemplate. You've been far, far ahead of us Regulus, intellectually if not emotionally. Always."

Regulus' breath escaped his lips like a tiny puff of fog and drifted up into the air, mingling ceaselessly into the night. Frank turned back round and propping his knuckles against the wall, leaned his head on his wrist, mapping out constellations that didn't exist in the great indigo canvas that was the sky.

_But we're all running, Frank. You...you never even took part in the race. You never felt the need to._

Mist was beginning to creep, slow and wraith-like, over the frost-encrusted glass of the window panes, beginning to white out the stars. The moon's light, pale and distant and untouchable, was the only thing that abated the mist, but itself a white blot against a black expanse of heaven. The wood of the window frame was slightly ajar, and probably needed to be pushed shut if the fog wasn't to filter into the cold, circular room at the top of the highest tower of Hogwarts, and clog their lungs. His legs were devoid of blood now, insensate, still for too long- and he wasn't in the slightest inclination to get up.

"Reg?"

He closed his eyes. "Hm?"

"Who's Perez?"

Regulus felt his lips flicker, disobediently. "My toy unicorn."

* * *

><p>Regulus didn't care to analyse the reasons why he was drifting away.<p>

Analysing would mean understanding, and understanding would lead to a detailed thesis of all the ways in which he could have prevented it. Not that he cared to prevent it either, but contemplation of all the spokes from the centre of a wheel, all paths radiating out from a focus now ruined to him was useless, and struck too close home to regret- an emotion that he truly loathed more than any other. Save one. You know which one.

He might have reflected more easily on might-haves and would-have-beens if they were actually plausible ones. Truth be told, there was little else left after Lucius Malfoy had proved himself to be watching, all this while, simply waiting on the right time- and though their first proper, real conversation had been too full of witticisms and rejoinders for Regulus to entertain any true hope, it was still an engagement of the brain. Frank Longbottom had actually passed the Auror application test, despite Defense Professor Whats-his-name going temporarily mad and assigning Bellatrix Black to be his 'aid' for preparatory sessions. Just as easily, one bright autumn morning, Frank tossed a black, pointy cap among thousands of others and drifted out of school- out of the Astronomy Tower, out of every Sunday morning breakfast, out of Regulus' days. Far from Slytherin house lighting itself on enthusiasm to join the new Culling, far from Sirius running away and never coming back, and Mother telling him it was finally time.

If he was going to leave Regulus without friends anyway, he might as well have had the courtesy to leave him the ability to make a couple more. But he hadn't allowed it, through proxy, via Regulus. Now Regulus talked to Malfoy and found him trite, and talked to Snape and found him limited and barred-in, and talked to Mother and found her an absolute burden.

There were no might-haves and would-have-beens, because when the Dark Lord swept in with his fanatic ideologies and fantastic reasoning, primitive mindset and limitless knowledge, power and charisma and intelligence that made_ him_ one of the most skilled wizards to pass through the halls of Hogwarts; there had been no doubts at all. Not a whit, after the dark-haired, pale young man had absently corrected a fatal flaw in Regulus' runic ward, saying it was better suited for a graveyard than for a safe house- even if said house was a shack whose owner, Gaunt, hadn't stepped within its dusty walls for years. How imbecilic Frank seemed then, how worthless his words...now he knew what it truly meant to know someone who'd always been ahead. But the budding Dark Lord wasn't looking for friends. He was looking for followers.

His finger ran down the crease, smoothing over the grainy image, black-and-white and speckled all over with brown flecks of age. The boy in the image had dark hair, bone-white face blurred beyond recognition, but the gormless grin on the old man he was shaking hands with, and the silver trophy in his hands was unmistakable. The photo was small, crammed into an indiscriminate corner of page four, the caption smaller and almost ant-like, but he'd been bred on the tomes of Grimmauld Place and had read smaller.

_Tom Riddle receives Award for Special Services to the School from Hogwarts Headmaster, Armando Dippet._

He traced a thumb over the face, nail pallid and washed out against the brilliant orange light filtering in through the dusty windows. A shadow moved across the page, and Regulus didn't even have the time to raise his head.

"Your new idol?" That familiar voice asked, and stepped forward; sunlight streaking past Frank's rusty locks and coring across sienna eyes. He was taller than he'd ever been, and his Auror robes swished heavily when he dropped into the chair across the table. He looked nigh unrecognisable in them, thick and formal and red- like a blind thrown across a window, muffling the light from within. It was several, several seconds before Regulus' eyes halted in scoping across the attire, halting themselves in their favourite game, because there was nothing purple on him.

"I would know." Frank said, words weighing themselves in the air the way they always did every time 'something important' was in the air. How strange. He'd almost think that Frank came here to meet him. "Your fanboy inclinations. Used to be me before, wasn't it?"

And Regulus finally looked up, grey eyes pinning brown, and briefly imagined tearing into Frank's throat with his bare nails. His voice began swiftly, coldly- words all jagged and falling over one other, intent to cut even each other to pieces. "Like you all don't go around prostrating yourself and kissing the robes of your Dumbledore-"

"There's no robe-kissing that goes around here." Frank smiled, lightly, bitingly. "You're confusing yourselves with us, I think."

There it was. There. It was silly, looking back on it- how long it had taken for them to arrive at this moment. Yourselves. Us. Regulus Black and Frank Longbottom had gone and gotten themselves to be part of a collective. A side. Different sides. Where individuals didn't matter, their hearts and memories didn't matter- just masses of faceless soldiers who maimed and killed and had no best friends.

"What are you doing here then?" His voice asked, blank and meaningless, devoid of curiosity.

There was no sound in the aftermath. Just quills scratching, and parchment crinkling while students prepared for their NEWT's and two young men stared past each other in the Hogwarts library. Wood creaked, and Frank lifted himself to his feet, sunlight glinting on the gold of the ring encircling his third finger, his voice a blank canvas of nothing.

"You have a spot. On your arm." And his leather soles scuffed against the wooden floorboards when they walked away.

Grey eyes remained motionless, then flickered down. There, where the white cuffs of the school shirt had been folded up to the elbow, on the skin turned pale and pallid by the sun, the tongue of a snake lay black and still.

_He heaved and heaved till there was nothing left, till the blood flowed thick and black from his mouth, drying and crusting on cracked lips. The cold stone burned against his knees, scraped against his patellas, scored the skin from bone- yet he could not rise. Something was rattling in his chest, the chest that wouldn't stop convulsing, that wouldn't understand there was nothing to force up his throat any longer- it rattled harder, a steady battering against his breast, and he thought it might be his heart, ready to leave this cage. Another wave of the agony, the pain, crashed over and his vision went black: tongue lolling out, head twisting this way and that, eyes rolling back, and Sirius' face loomed under his eyelids, soft and mocking,'Crying over an antbite, Reggie?'- and when sight was restored in blurry spots and patches, the floor zooming up to view, he thought his heart must be lying on the stone somewhere, puked up in the last fit, a chewed up, mangled bit of muscle and tissue._

_Freezing, diamond-hard fingers seized his chin and pulled, and Regulus looked up- up, up, into pupil less eyes, The Dark Lord scraped a nail down his cheek, the Voice crawling past his ear to coil onto the floor of his mind, like a python, to never leave. "I hope you don't hesitate again, my friend..."_

_His fingers, clutching the hem of his shirt for the last ...whatever time had passed, like a baby's hands fisting into a mother's apron, were being uncurled- something cold and hard pushed against his palm, his trembling, insensate fingers then forced to wrap around the solid rod: and Regulus' pain-ridden eyes blinked down at the fuzzy looking shaft of wood, and realisation struck. Beech, unicorn feather, eleven inches. _

_Despite the sensation still stringing tight every nerve synapse in his body, Regulus could feel his wand humming in his hand, and he'd never felt more repulsed in his life. _

Then he tugged the cuffs down, and buttoned them, fingers slipping more than once in sliding the plain white buttons through the hemmed holes. The creases from the folds lay sharp and crinkled against the starched cotton, even as arms flexed in apparent exhaustion, then swept the little pile of articles on Tom Marvolo Riddle to the side, teetering off the end of the table. Books lay open underneath, ink stained books, blood stained books, _Secrets of the Darkest Art _propped open next to a nameless tome. The words were curlicued, smudged, archaic...yet one bolded word seemed to jump out from the nearest open page, like it spun threads to your eyes and pulled them in, demanding to be seen.

_Horcruxes._

* * *

><p>His feet thundered past the hallway, soles pounding against the tile, skidding perilously to the side with every corner turned. The invasive smell of lemon disinfectant filled his nasal cavities, lungs drawing the aerosol in with every inward breath; dawn could barely be glimpsed beyond the window panes, night mingling endlessly with day, even the white tile of St. Mungo's bleached out by the grey dreariness of it all, the colourless sky, the lightless day swamped by clouds that wouldn't rain. It was more than the lack of sun, more than the storm clouds that would never break, more than the fog that stole into the precincts of every home through the gap beneath the doors, dribbled in through the keyholes, took every safe place, every whispered conversation captive for its own. It was the unnamed menace that choked the air, the overwhelming feeling of the world holding its breath in on itself, teetering unmistakably at the edge of a gigantic precipice, waiting to fall. Waiting to break. It dulled the breath expelled out of his lips now, weighed down on his limbs, made the pulse fluttering in his throat seem far and distant and not his own. It was the setting of a surreal dream, and Regulus was waiting to wake.<p>

But he had, three days ago- and he wasn't a theoretical genius, he was nothing but the greatest, most eminent, most supreme fool that the world would ever know- and realisation hadn't crashed down upon him, it had sneaked up to him at night and stabbed him in the gut. It had screamed in his face, making cold sweat break over his skin and seventy two hours, seventy two hours of a voice muttering restlessly in his ear- _hurry, hurry, __**hurry**_**- **had brought him here, world shattered to smithereens around him, because he couldn't do it alone any longer.

His hands scrabbled at the handle, and the door flew open, Regulus stumbling in after it, tripping over the trailing end of his cloak, half undone and slipping off his shoulder, throat dry and stitch flaming in his side. The Spell Damage corridor was silent, and deserted as the grave, and he staggered his way through unseeingly, till his knees knocked into each other when his feet stopped abruptly halfway through the passage. There was a man sitting on a lone chair at the end, profile shrouded by darkness, head in his hands; his normally wavy hair flattened to his jaws and the back of his neck by sweat, brown strands turned almost black.

His knees were shaking. They daren't move further, not even an inch, for fear of buckling. The cold air scored past his lips when they parted, jaw working uselessly for several seconds.

"F..." His vocal cords strained. His throat was drier than a desert. "Frank."

Frank didn't look up.

His fingers flexed, like claws, clenching and digging and releasing repeatedly. Regulus didn't know if his voice, rebounding off the hollow walls, was as tinny and childish as it sounded. He couldn't care. He couldn't care if it sounded like a bag of broken glass.

"I can't...do this anymore. Alone. I..." The spit caught, at the edge of his voice. He swallowed past it. "I can't."

Frank's chest moved, up and down, up and down, inhaling and exhaling, the only thing moving in that paralysed passageway.

"I've been...an idiot." And his tone wasn't nearly vehement enough, frayed and mended and broken again and barely holding together at the edges. But it wouldn't be enough now, not even if he cried blood and sang tears. "I didn't...I didn't know."

But it seemed ridiculously emotionless now, almost blase- and he wanted to raise the pitch, speak louder, speak faster, scream- Salazar, but it wouldn't listen, wouldn't fucking listen, would stubbornly stay the way it was, and of course if there was any time in his life that ridiculous Black sangfroid would raise its head, of bloody course it would be now.

"But that isn't...important. What is...Vol-the Dark Lord has tried to- has made..." Regulus blinked, and felt the floor shudder under his feet. "He's made things. Horcruxes. Bits of soul. He can't die. He can't die, Frank."

The door creaked, groaning heavily in the wind.

"I found one. He showed it to me, I don't think he understood that I would..." Regulus blinked his eyes again, and felt them prickle. "...that I would get it. Figure it out. I almost didn't want to, but..." And Kreacher's face flashed before his eyes again, twisted in the throes of pain beyond imagining, thrashing on the floor of the cavern where the light was greener than poison, and the Dark Lord surveying it all with a small smile on his face. "...but I couldn't close my eyes tighter than they were."

And the world had never felt more surreal than this, than this moment suspended between midnight and dawn, when Regulus Black chose to stop hiding under the facade of names- Black, intelligent, Pureblood, strong. The moment to finally swing his feet down from the bed of goosedown, pull aside the curtains and wake.

"Help me."

"Frank?"

His heart leapt to his throat, the voice came from round the corner, the other end of the corridor- and his feet staggered back, weaker than rain slushed clay, hand reaching back wildly to grasp at the edge of the door and pull himself behind it again, the banging sound resounding loudly through the corridor- out of body, out of control, a stranger inhabiting a Death Eater's skin. The were- Lupin, who'd just entered, looked like a living corpse, dilapidated strands of hair hanging over hollowed eyes, yet still glancing suspiciously in his direction. Regulus ducked his head beneath the transparent pane fitted into the door, sinking to his haunches, palms flattening against the floor, ear resting against the wood.

"Was there someone here?" Lupin asked, and after seconds of nothing but blood throbbing in Regulus' ears, he caught a murmured, "Finite."

Unable to stop, his knees straightened, vision skimming the level of the glass pane- and watched Frank blink, startled before Lupin's concerned face, then sponge a fingerpad against the rim of his ear and holding it up to almost non-existent light, something brownish red gleaming at the ends.

"Deafening Charm." Frank said, unfeelingly.

All other sight, hearing, touch...even the sound of his own beating life force faded from Regulus' ears. His vision was tunneling before his eyes, a hollow circle of sight against all the black. The world froze for a millisecond, waiting on his non-existent breath, spinning off its axis- then continued rotating again, ruthlessly merciless like it always did.

"James and...the others are coming." Lupin said, quietly. He looked awkward, looming over Frank's bowed head, abnormally lanky limbs refusing to fold down and sit. He buried his fingers in his trouser pockets, and shifted from one leg to the next. The next words were quieter, almost careful. "Is she...are you-"

"No." Frank said, and Regulus could watch his fingers shake in the gloam, steepling into themselves to stabilise whitened knuckles. His chest drew into itself, impossibly tight, then released an unsteady exhale.

"It wasn't your fault." Lupin delivered, swift and quick, and Regulus had had no idea that the once mild-mannered Gryffindor Prefect could sound so martial. Like he'd done it a million times before, delivered reassurances in the face of hopelessness. "You weren't to know, everything was in chaos, none of us could _see-_"

"And that's supposed to make it better." That was the Frank he knew, cutting straight to the point- and yet not the Frank at all, because there was something desperate about the curl of the man's fingers around his elbows, something tightly reigned in the set of his shoulders and the tendons standing out sharply against his neck. Everything about the man on the bench screamed brittle- and Regulus let the fact chip away at the foundations of everything he knew to be true in this world. Several pillars of it had crashed down in the past few days already.

Lupin seemed to glimpse it too, for the man immediately went down to his knees, hand clasping Frank's knee in turn, voice fast and barely seeming sewed in at the fringes, with an undertone of steel not to be argued with. "You _weren't to know._ We couldn't see our hands before our faces in the fog, thanks to the blasted Dementors, curses were flying everywhere, fucking _Voldemort _was there- " He stopped, almost as if striving to bring down the frustration in the words to a controllable level. "...we were lucky to leave the place alive. Alice is brilliant, you know she is, but she can't hold her own in front of Bellatrix and you heard them and its only obvious you did what you did and..." And there was a hesitance here, as if even the silver-tongued werewolf of Gryffindor didn't know how to phrase this next part agreeably. "...and you missed. You hit the wrong target. That's it."

"The wrong target was my wife." Frank's face seemed stark, ravaged of all that made it warm in the grey light of dawn. Something pale and colourless was trickling down his jaw.

"And both of you _will get through this_." Lupin looked destroyed, like a child's castle of sand that had crumbled at his feet, so needed to keep the other castles on the beach standing so as to believe that he could ever build his own again. "This was the third time you defied Voldemort. You can't let go now."

"I defied nothing." Frank's head leaned back, like Regulus had watched it a thousand times against the stones of the Astronomy Tower, but the thud against the wall echoed hollowly. There were no galaxies to watch now, just the tiled ceiling of the hospital corridor.

His knees withdrew from the cold tile, creaking slightly as they straightened out, cloak brushing silently against his shoes. The door seemed strangely solid, impenetrable, separating two worlds; even though he could see through the clouded glass and Frank's eyelids close against themselves. Regulus watched his own breath escape through thin lips, moisture cooling into ice-white crystals suspended in the air; and turned, listening to his silent footsteps fade out into nothing.

* * *

><p>"Master...Master <em>please<em>..."

"Go." His throat was a gurgling mess of words, his head a flood of white noise, but he needed to get this out. He had to get this out. "Y...you have to get it out of here."

Kreacher's terrified eyes loomed, large and lamp-like in the darkness, glassy with moisture. Thin, knobbly fingers were pawing at Regulus' wrists, but they kept on slipping out, slick with the water of the dead. Regulus blinked against the images, the images brought by the potion, ripping his mind apart like the onset of the _Cruciatus_, and dug his elbows into the rock, the jagged edges flaying skin, struggling to keep hold of reality. It seemed a lot like the icy fingers wrapped around his ankles, dragging him off the shore- but he had to hold on.

"Ta...ta'e th-this." His mouth felt full of blood, Regulus spat it out to the side. Chest heaving, he lay his feverish forehead against the cool rock, and stretched to fasten Kreacher's trembling hands around the thick golden chain knotted in his fingers.

"K..Kreacher can't leave Master alone..." Kreacher let go off his wrists, eyes fixated on the gold trinket clasped in his own hands in horror, then flung his frail arms around Regulus' neck, frantically pulling. Regulus could feel the house-elf's ribcage rattle against his chin. "M-Mistress would be so h..heartbroken..."

"Mistress doesn't care." Regulus lifted his face to the green light and smiled, relishing in the last piece of contact he would ever get. From a house elf. Kreacher seemed to break down further, the tiny frame wracked with shudders, pulling and twisting ineffectually at the collar of Regulus' shirt. "N-no..n-n-no no no.."

"Kreacher. _Kreacher._" His arms let go of the final hold they had the rock to still Kreacher's pulling hands, and his waist sunk a little more under the bay, legs disappearing into that eternal grasp. He could feel the cold inching up his sides, soaking the flannel of his shirt with inky water that made gravity's pull heavier, seeking to paralyse- and he fought against the heaviness, the pain that had dulled to corpse-like languor, straining to keep his eyes open for the final moment. "Ta...take it. Give it to..." His throat closed. "Destroy it. Its my last request to you."

Kreacher froze in his grasp, eyes strife with anguish; and Regulus could barely make his unfeeling lips move.

"...please."

Kreacher nodded then, a rapid, spastic jerk of a motion, and wrenched himself free, dissolving into thin air in Regulus' arms; the pop of Disapparition echoing in the cavern- maybe for long after. Regulus didn't know.

Without the anchor, his body was set afloat. His nose kissed the water, dark lashes clumping above his eyes; and as he looked past the interface, between water and air, death and life, he could see white faces seeing back with sightless eyes, bodies splayed out in the dark- callling out to him. Spreading their arms. His hand tightened over a long, damp stick of wood...his wand.

"_Incendio._"

The last thing he saw was the wand lighting itself aflame, burning in his hand: and Regulus let himself sink beneath the deep.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: If you like, please review. Pretty, pretty please?**

_Frank Alexander Longbottom_

_Born 4__th__ March, 1958_

_Died 19__th__ April, 2004_

_"My son and his wife were tortured into insanity by You-Know-Who's followers. They were Aurors, you know, and very well respected within the wizarding community. Highly gifted, the pair of them."_

There were a great many things Frank wondered about.

He didn't think he was doing any one any great offense, by wondering about these things. Indeed, these things seemed to be no one's business at all- so Frank made it his business to collect all of these in the cocoons of his mind and wonder about them at his leisure.

Like the vendetta his mother seemed to have against birds. It was highly suspicious, parts of it, how she seemed to adore- no, prefer, Augusta Longbottom couldn't adore anything if her life depended on it- to massacre perfectly harmless birds and stick the entirety or dissected parts of them on her hats. Nobody else in their circle seemed to be taken up with such fetishes ("fashions, Frank, _fashions_," Regulus would curl his lip, "-this is what happens when bumbling Gryffindors try to use words beyond their mental faculties") so either his mother had been a vole gobbled up by an owl in her previous life, who was now out to exact vengeance in her current, or the fowl had a fet- um, hitherto unknown desire of being stuffed into hats and paraded up and down Diagon.

("Yes yes, snicker on you stupid brat, you _know _you love listening to my theories.")

So...that. That had occupied a great deal of Frank's musings when he was little...and then not so little. Then came the Gryffindor Colour Conundrum. While scarlet and gold was very Arthurian and all that, it was quite beyond Frank's comprehension why the Gryffindor house colour wasn't purple. Considering how Gryffindors practically gorged on altruism and nobility, and how the colour purple was the symbol of royalty and nobility and so on forth. (He could probably insert a lot more here, but there was only so much you could test the patience of a Black). It was practically the only reason he rejoiced in the Prefect badge, because he'd finally be able to get rid of all that neon red which hurt his eyes ("I _told_ you it was annoyi-" "Oh hush Reg."), but apparently Prefects weren't allowed to do that.

He'd even asked Professor McGonagall very, very politely whom he'd have to contact to have the colours changed, and she told him, a little archly if he said so himself, to write a letter of petition to the Founders and sprinkle a little bit of Time-sand on it. Naturally, he went and asked Regulus, who was the only person he knew who asserted to have a Time Turner, but the Slytherin rudely refused, saying that he wasn't going to waste his precious sand on such a 'trite' subject. Personally, Frank didn't think the Ministry would let a single Time Turner out of their sight, and thought Regulus was a big, fat liar. Also disrespectful, because the subject certainly wasn't trite- colour discrimination was apparently a great rage nowadays.

And there you go. That was the Blacks for you, greedy little buggers, taking over anything and everything they possibly stepped into. This account was supposed to be about Frank's childhood and _upbringing_, darn it.

So Frank Longbottom was born to a father who died before he barely knew him, and a mother who was apparently determined not to let him forget her even on his honeymoon. Uncle Algie was absolutely nutters and the only reason Frank had a childhood at all; and Aunt Abernathy patted him on the head every time he made a particularly nice drawing which Mother refused to sniff at. Oh, and he was the only Gryffindor who called his mum Mother. In retrospect, maybe that whole friendship-with-the-Slytherin-that-shall-not-be-mentioned wasn't all so surprising after all.

He was generally well liked in school, probably due to being saner outside his head than in it. He was Gryffindor Prefect. He was not Head Boy. Also, for the record, he'd seen Alice Prewett on Platform 9 and 3/4 before his first year, a good half hour, and technically one year and half hour before James Potter had seen Lily Evans- so the argument of which pair was more epic is nullified. Of course, being in possession of far more sense, he had spoken to her only in his sixth year.

Frank tugged on an errant lock of hair, forehead furrowing in thought. Surely there was more to his life than just...that.

"Are you quite done yet?"

Frank crooked his head to the sight, and watched Regulus Black tap his fingernails on the stone parapet of the Tower, an expression of such...forbearance, such woe-is-me-for-I-have-a-brain etched on his sharply delineated features that Frank entertained himself by watching, for a while.

Regulus said nothing. Forbearance.

"You are a disgrace to the name of a Slytherin." Was Frank's much looked-forward to conclusion.

"I dare not ask why, for you will tell me anyway." Regulus spared out aloud, and said a great many non-complimentary things inside. Being the good friend and the illegal Legilimens that he was, Frank let it roll aside.

Instead, he approached the important topic at hand, and delivered his arguments in favour of the motion. "You do not smirk. You do not arch an eyebrow. You do not examine your cuticles."

Regulus' brows reached his hairline- but shame, it was both of them. He spoke the next words with immense gravitas, as if deliberating on the meaning of each word. "I do not...smirk."

Frank waited patiently. He neglected to add how Regulus failed to do much of anything really, considering how his face appeared to be in a perennial coma.

"I do not...raise my...eyebrows."

"An eyebrow." Frank corrected. It was important that the distinction be made.

Regulus nodded. "It is rather difficult to do that."

"And you do not examine your cuticles." Frank repeated for clarity's sake.

"And I do not examine my cuticles." Regulus appeared to be in deep thought. Or he put on the appearance of it very, very nicely. "I _am _a boy. Is it rather necessary for me to do that?"

"Imperative." Frank said seriously. His lips though, seemed not to comprehend his seriousness and were twitching violently. Strangely enough, now that he thought about it...there was something in the lines of Regulus' comatose face that was doing it too.

"Isn't it sufficient for me to want to be remembered for all eternity then?" Regulus' both hands were fastened around the parapet and he leaned forward, over and down, swinging imperceptibly on the balls of his feet. Forget comatose, there was something incredibly young about his face in that moment.

The mock seriousness melted away, and the ephemeral smile always curling at the bottom of his lip, brisked the surface of Frank's face. He leaned over the parapet too, watching the dewed grass a hundred feet below. "Do you really want that?"

Regulus' grey eyes flickered above, to the night sky they both loved, and he didn't need lips to smile if his eyes could glow like that. His voice grew smoother, accent more lyrical- words licking around themselves the way they did every time he was about to narrate the history of a royal bloodline, or an account of a battle, or something equally glorious. "Watch the skies, there? It isn't just a tapestry of stars woven onto Nyx's dressing gown. Its a portal to somewhere else. Its a looking glass into the past."

"The stars we see today are actually the light from stars millions of years ago. They're so distant that they take millenia to reach us. Maybe some of them have imploded into blinding light and nova by now. Maybe some of them have dwindled to dust." Regulus' eyes clouded over, the untainted starlight a million years old flashing off the grey surface, turning them liquid silver. "But they're there. Right there in front of our eyes, almost as if we could stretch our hands and pluck them out of the sky. As long as their light exists...they're there."

Frank felt the breeze ripple through the sleeves of his shirt, and he blinked- breathing the night in all over again. It was like resurfacing from a deep sleep, and watching the world anew with fresher eyes.

"I'd rather choose what I'd be remembered as, than how long I'd be remembered for. Wouldn't you?"

Regulus tilted his face towards him, ethereal silver dulling to ordinary human grey: and smiled, a little slowly, a little hesitantly. Sometimes he'd watch for a while, as if trying to evaluate the worth of Frank's words. Sometimes it would take days until he'd even try to meet, again. But eventually, at the end of it all. He would always smile.

* * *

><p>His teeth might splinter; if he clenched them any tighter. He wasn't doing it voluntarily: he'd always thought Fabian looked unparalleled-ly prattish every time his rectangular jaw tightened further and that curious grinding sound emanated somewhere from its vicinity. But sometimes a fifteen year old boy had to succumb to basic instincts. And if there was one thing that Bellatrix Black knew how to do, was to arouse the most primitive, vicious, feral instincts that a human possessed- even if said human was a traditionally controlled, even-tempered marvel of a teenager.<p>

The very name- Bellatrix, god it even sounded all sharp and pinced and heartless- sent a spasm of black anger coiling up his veins, tightening his knees where they were soaking up the wetness from the grass by the gallons, making his insides twist tautly. Of course, Frank tamed it a second after, raising a calm, unyielding chin up to the chilled air even from his kneeling position on the cold, hard, uncompromising ground.

Bellatrix was there a centimetre away, stark patrician features compromised by the fey eyes, vampire thin lips pulled wide into an expression of such smug, gloating, headstrong satisfaction that the urge bubbled with sheer immediacy to the surface, the urge to pull back a fist and shatter those teeth, to crumple that aristocratically cruel nose, to mar that face regardless of the female body it belonged to. Female, Regulus' voice scoffed at the back of his head, there was nothing remotely feminine about that face. Every feature, every blemish was magnified thousand fold, reflected in his eyes as he stared up; there was unworldliness in that face, nothing about it natural- not the beauty, not the ugliness, not the sheer vividness of black hair and white skin, not the cruelty.

A dark lock slid over that almost unnaturally prominent brow as Bellatrix widened her eyes, in the curdlingly sweet mockery of concern. "Didn't see that coming?"

Frank blinked, and reduced the ram battering away at his mental shields to dust. "Wouldn't be on the ground right now if I did."

Bellatrix's face hardened into a smooth, impenetrable veneer- whether at the lack of reaction or the failed attempt at Legilimency, it was impossible to tell. A cool finger hooked around his chin, and Frank had to flatten the impossible, knee-jerk instinct to resist, rear back in rebellion; and rose to his feet at the whim of the guiding touch- because Bellatrix was one of those predators who liked their prey to kick their legs, deriving twisted amusement from the fruitless flailing of the ones under their thumb, liked watching the fire splutter and eventually die out. And he wasn't one to be hunted all that easily.

Warm air crawled over his jaw, creating prickles of sensation and Frank repressed the flinch with barely a tremor, looking back remorselessly into black, pit-like eyes. It was almost unthinkable how Regulus and the witch before him were related- while the Black scion forever maintained an almost religious dedication to reserve and distance, his aversion to human contact almost rivalling disgust; Bellatrix got right up in your face, laying claim to every inch of shared air, marking territory with trailing fingers that stank of her unchallenged belief that the world and its inhabitants were her sole property; and hers alone. Even now, two points of heat creeped along his skin and dug in on two sides of his chin, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger in a proprietary grip; and apparently this time his stiffness wasn't so well concealed because Bellatrix leaned back, satisfied- releasing his jaw after patting it in patronising approval.

Frank had to close his eyes to conceal the, for a second, almost incontrollable flare of heat demanding an outlet, abdomen compressing to a hard, unyielding wall. This, this was _exactly_ why the fountain of logic, saint of rationale that was Frank Longbottom who could understand the reasoning behind any, apparently unforgivable action, and put himself into the shoes of any witch or wizard; had let his vices triumph in this case- _exactly _why Bellatrix Black was one of the lone people in his lifetime who'd managed to crawl beneath his skin and carved a permanent place of distaste. An unignorable prick, a thorn smarting up his side every time he caught a glimpse of those lidded eyes around the walls of Hogwarts, those eyes that would light themselves up in unholy joy if those very walls were razed to their foundations. But it proved to be a mistake, for in that very second, memories rushed with nauseating speed up to the surface: teeth bared in a smile that was the most fucking condescending thing he'd ever laid eyes on, nostrils sniffing, brows high, dark eyes alight with sneering amusement, that soft, soft voice- _"Alice? Oh, how sweet._"

_My mother is Augusta Longbottom. _What bloody trash, he thought, while his teeth went numb and attempted to eradicate all feeling in his gums. His mother would have kicked him out of the house if he'd tried to learn anything illegal. No, his prowess in the Mind Arts was all due to Bellatrix Black alone- those piercing, gleeful eyes, that relentless hammer leaving pounding headaches in the cranium, a hollow bell ringing for hours after- stripped of every thought, plucked of every dream and fantasy and fear that would and would not matter, a fly under a microscope with its wings pulled off slowly, painstakingly by the forceps. And though she couldn't touch his mind now, his blood simmered most for this- the tiny, cold clasp of fear that settled into his gut every evening at seven o'clock, the cold thought that maybe, his shields would fail once again this time. It hadn't happened for two years. The thought still hadn't let go.

"Don't look so worried, Longbottom." Bellatrix's smile widened in caustic sympathy. Her long, tapering fingers tapping at the waist of her robe dipped in; and drew out, wrapped around a small, leather pouch tied with a cord of twine. She tossed it, from one hand to the next, eyes never leaving him. They never did. The words, coated with honey concern grated on his ears, "It won't hurt a bit. I _promise_."

His lips cracked despite themselves, amusement filtering out in small, unnoticeable dribbles. Faint, low-key, his voice couldn't have been more different from her ostentatious, loud, hubristic taunts if he'd tried. "I wasn't aware we were cracking jokes, Bellatrix."

Bellatrix's eyes narrowed with predictable displeasure- not even an idiot needed Legilimency to read her. Sometimes, the objective part of him that wasn't coloured all over with House pride recognised she was much more of a bloody Gryffindor than he'd ever been. A step forward where there should have been a step back, a hiss, and flecks of breath peppered his jaw. "Getting a bit too familiar, aren't you?"

"Five years of solid enmity, and now you're even my mentor." Frank looked back at her unblinkingly. Evenly, maddeningly neutral. "Guiding me to my dreams. I'd say I was entitled to a bit of familiarity."

"Well, that's _your problem_, isn't it Longbottom." And nothing held back the spittle now, her voice spitting venom; Bellatrix's eyes flashed like a star gone berserk- closing the distance till she was almost breathing on his tongue and Frank wondered who she thought she was trying to intimidate. "You naive Gryffindor filthspawn get comfortable too easily."

"Filthspawn. Full points for creativity, must sa-" Brown eyes caught on fine black grains, darker for all their shimmer, dribbling between the creases of white, pure, tapering fingers- and breath stuttered midspeech, despite itself. Two blinks, quick in succession. His voice sounded muted. "Instant Darkness powder."

"That's right." Bellatrix glanced aside at the pouch her fingers had untied mid conversation, and scraped a pared nail down the leather. Coal black lashes lifted back up, and the lines marking her high forehead smoothened out- languorous, lilting voice a sweet, sizzling oil to the temper flame. "None of that Bolivian rubbish either. Imported straight from the mines of Lima."

Then she tilted her chin to the side, blinking widely, lips compressed into a moue of faux, childish wonder- and her voice was the most reprehensible melange of loathing and delight that had ever existed. "Scared of the dark, baby boy?"

Somewhere underneath his tightly composed jaw, concealed behind lips, his teeth were cutting into skin, seeping blood. "I hardly think the Auror test would involve dueling in the pitch dark."

"Oh you don't?" Bellatrix tapped her index nail on the depression under her lip, brows drawn in mock thought. Her eyes were cold, flat iron. "Good thing your thoughts don't count for a Knut then."

The black grains had started trickling on the ground already, Frank could see the silver light reflected off the Black Lake fading out. He was clasping at straws- already his heart had slowed down to a steady, dulled thump, like every time a situation that threatened to pull him over was thrust on him, ready to weather it out. "You wouldn't be able to see either."

"And therein lies the catch." The moon, the lake, the towering beech tree that was their every night haunt, the barely existent waves rippling against the shore; everything had started melding to black. Only her face stood out in the blurring picture, bone white skin pulled into the contortions of a smile. "Its only when your sight is taken away from you that you truly learn to see."

"And I can see flawlessly, Longbottom."

The night was absolute, mortal eyes blinded, and the backhand across his cheekbone sent him reeling to the ground, skull cracking against the ground. 

* * *

><p>"Who do you think is the hottest girl in school?"<p>

Frank heard the eyes rolling in the cranium next to his even through all the godforsaken hooting (It was owl mating night). He rather thought if Regulus rolled his eyes even more generously than he normally did, although it was all inward as the action was too plebeian for the pontifical affectations of his best mate's kind, then the eyeballs would give up on friction then and there and roll right out of his sockets. Inwardly, of course.

Frank attempted at the lost cause one last time. "I've been reliably informed its a topic that normal male teenagers discuss. On a frequent basis."

A sigh of exasperation, followed by an inward inhale- oh Merlin, Regulus was actually preparing to acknowledge the topic in form of actual, formed words, the sheer _charity _of that boy, it almost made Frank weep for joy. He couldn't find himself charitable enough to be actually polite about it, of course. "Normal male teenagers also leave their underthings-" of course again, Merlin forbid Regulus ever spilled the word 'boxers' from those untainted lips, "-lying indiscriminately on the floor. On a frequent basis."

Frank blinked slowly, almost widely, if he had had that pristine Black facial structure to pull it off, hopefully conveying everything with that single motion: _And that is something wrong because?_

Regulus pulled those aforementioned pristine features in the most delicate construction of disgust there had ever been beheld. Then he visibly paused, and after the universal sigh of put upon-ness, this time, pursed out almost gingerly. "Who do you think is the most...appealing female in school, then?"

Turning the question away from himself, the questionee, to the questioner. If Mother Teresa didn't compose elegies on this liberal generosity, Frank didn't know who would. But he was a nice guy, _the _nice guy, and he could put up with all the generosities in the world, even those bestowed by particularly prattish Blacks.

"Selene Zeller."

Regulus tapped his toe cap against the floor.

"Ariadne Greengrass."

Yawned.

"Marlene McKinnon."

Raised two eyebrows. Really now, this was getting excessive.

"Alice Prewett." Frank gave up.

A facsimile of a smile. Regulus rolled his arms above his head and stretched, or what in Pureblood Land passed for a stretch, which really was a minor extension of fingers and toes. Frank, who by birthright was entitled a tour or two in aforesaid land, or even a permanent residential complex, spared no brain function to contemplate why he hadn't been offered one. The Black stopped it with the phalange gymnastics and curved his lips, probably in what he thought was a very obliging manner. "Now that you've succeeded in this wonderfully cunning ploy to confess your publically known feelings for one inept Hufflepuff to your best friend, am I allowed to go back to my book?"

Frank being the optimistic person that he was, chose not to focus on the whole epically insulting aspect of it at all, instead on the fact that Regulus Black had condescended to call himself his best mate, and was actually _asking permission _for something. Rhetorics, of course, but still a point of celebration. "S'matter of fact, I was interested in knowing if your prick is as frigid as your head, actually."

"Shouldn't you be saying heart?" Regulus sounded bored, not even shocked by the blatant use of 'prick'. Maybe Pureblood Land had finally relaxed the strict censorship laws with regards to allusions to sexual matters. Like finally acknowledge that little Pureblood babies all over the world weren't dropped into their fifty thousand Galleon cribs by storks.

(Yes, storks. The Slytherin orgy rumours were a _lie._)

"The seat of emotions is the brain, not the heart. That just pumps blood, actually." Weren't theoretical geniuses, regardless of how non-Muggle, supposed to know that?

"Frigid as an Arctic wasteland." Regulus replied dryly, completely avoiding the matter of how he'd been blatantly wrong, like he did every single time.

A light puff of dismissive amusement into the air, which was if he admitted it himself, ten times better than Regulus' derisive scoffing noises. There were some things you just couldn't learn. "Not even thawed by Lily Evans?"

There it was, one of those scoffing noises. The tone that accompanied it though, was almost casually brutal. "Why in the name of Salazar would a Mudblood interest me?"

There was a catch in the air, a slight drop in the temperature whose cause was all too easy to pinpoint. His words were knitted tightly into one another, voice calm and measuring and composed, almost irrelevant. Some part of his brain was laughing at his stupidity. For all of his claimed objectivity, some things were beyond even his capability to justify. "Oh, I wouldn't know. Forbidden fruit, maybe. Or the intelligence, or the good looks, or even the razor sharp wit. Certainly not the polluted breed."

Regulus said nothing. His expression didn't change. If Frank knew better, he'd say that the Black was almost confused at where this was coming from. Why.

"If I asked you to pick among the class of non-humans though, you'd certainly pick her." The sound of the book closing in his hands was a thud, the spine resting firmly along the callus of his palm. He turned to the side and pinched apart a space in his book bag by an index finger and a thumb, sliding the slim tome into place. He sealed the bag back up. "I'd pick Bellatrix though, if I had to."

That certainly got the bastard's attention, the name of his cousin. Cousin. That had been almost moronically easy to forget. Frank hefted the strap of his satchel over his shoulder, slinging it round his neck, and felt grey eyes scanning the lines of his face.

He waited ten whole seconds, standing at the bench in the courtyard where they finished their holiday reading on lazy Sundays. When he'd turned and walked ten feet away, Regulus still didn't seem inclined in the slightest to open his mouth. Trying to correct assumptions, or clarify opinions and stands, or even offer a word of protest.

Frank was thankful for it. He never assumed. Any word that might have exited out of those lips would have been a lie. 

* * *

><p>"You're wasting your time."<p>

Sirius Black's face wasn't one of the sights one aspired to, dark and stormy and resentment riddled, the first thing as one emerged from the Common room for the last Yuletide ball of one's school career. Especially when one was a seventeen year old boy, or even a girl who wasn't all so inclined to the broody and tempestuous and I-live-to-look-tragically-beautiful type. Keeping all the above details in consideration, the fact that Frank stopped at all to turn and listen to the prima donna melting out of the shadows spoke multitudes of his temperament. The angels should be coming with his halo any time now.

Once the prerequisite shadow melting was complete, the sixteen year old glowered rather dramatically from the corner.

Frank blinked. "You have to be a bit more specific than that." Wasting time how? Maybe he wasn't half as swoon-worthy as all the female Hogwarts population seemed to regard James and Sirius to be, but that didn't mean cleaning up before an evening was entirely a waste. As an afterthought. "Sorry mate."

Sirius threw him a barely restrained contemptuous look. Blacks. Supercilious bastards, the lot of them. His voice was tightened around the vowels, like spelling it out was the most worthless exercise of his life. "With my _brother_."

A part of Frank's mind wondered if the boy half-hidden by the pillar beside the window sill could see his eyes shift. Unfluctuatingly, without missing a breath, "I didn't know you still considered him as one."

"Its they who-" The words burst from Sirius like a torrent flooding the dam, but stopped just as suddenly, the words sealed forever behind a wall of tightly compressed lips. The halted flow of speech was awkward, but Sirius stubbornly raised his chin along with a curl of the lip, as if arrogance was enough to plow down the moment of vulnerability. "That's inconsequential. Its _you _who I'm trying to warn anyway, not him."

_You're an absolutely horrible liar, mate. _Snarky comments were just those, comments; trotted out within the precincts of Frank's head to amuse him- but he bore no dislike towards Sirius. The boy was truly one of the most blindingly loyal people he'd ever met. Sirius on his part seemed quite...controlled. He, his friends, his classmates, they all were...they seemed quite...

"_Deferential." Regulus snapped a floret of broccoli between his fingers and bit in, the clean white edge of his teeth incising in. He seemed struck by one of those glorifically mercurial moods, the ones where Frank couldn't quite make out whether his best mate was praising his virtues to the skies or insulting him with the last bit of contempt he had left. "You could join their puerile gang at any point of time and they'd just bow and scrape to have you in. The Marauders." He, dare Frank say it, sniffed and crushed the veggie under his molars as if it had murdered his sweetheart._

"_Puerile." Frank repeated out loud, just to feel the pronunciation under his tongue. Then continuing on, in as light a voice as can be, "Hard to imagine James and Sirius bowing and scraping before even the Queen of England, actually."_

"_Sirius would slap her on the rump and call her a merry old hag." Grey eyes surveyed the pale green stalk, fingers holding it up to the light as if deeming it worth the effort to digest. "She always gave us the nicest biscuits when we were small. Well, her cook did anyway."_

_Frank did not disgrace the last statement with a comment. Even inside his head._

"_Of course, they won't __**actually **__bow and scrape or anything. That's exactly why they'd have you in." Apparently the broccoli stalk passed muster, because it disappeared with a crunch under sharpened incisors a second later. "That's exactly why you'd never fit in."_

"_I'd like to say you're making delightful insights, or at the least a whole lot of sense here but-"_

"_They look up to you because you'd never be like them." Regulus' interruption was sharp. It was a bit of a shock, to hear the usually shackled voice so...exposed. "You don't have enough insecurity to breed pride. You're not a puny boy who thrives on bullying and making others feel small just to confirm the importance of your own existence." Grey eyes looked sideways, away. "You don't hide behind your superiority."_

_Two beats of silence. Frank's gaze flickered down, to where Regulus was absentmindedly rubbing the bared, unmarred fore of his left arm. He'd been doing it for quite a while now. It wasn't like Reg to pick up a tic._

_The air felt weighted, material. Possible, in the face of this vulnerability, in the face of this respect and trust, actually possible words, questions, concerns...they were coagulating at the base of his throat. Cutting off air. His eyes darted down again._

"_Puerile. That actually isn't a word, is it?"_

_Regulus laughed._

Of course, Sirius was a little different. For someone who declared his love to every third person he bumped into in the corridors, he was unusually cool in his manner towards Frank. Maybe a Haircolour Changing Charm here, a pointed jab over breakfast there. Much, much better than how Regulus treated James actually. Those Tentacula pods were absolute overkill. And all because someone else got along with their brother better than they did. The Black version of sentimentality. Frank wondered what it meant for his sanity that he considered the entire thing almost touching.

"He's a friggin' blood purist." Sirius burst out and Frank startled; the former was probably not very used to people forgetting about his presence mid-conversation. The words fell all over each other, as if desperate to be pushed out all at once, dark and bitter and chipped at the edges. "He doesn't give a shit about Muggles. He doesn't give a shit about anyone. He _likes _the Dark Arts, he finds them _fascinating_, he actually fucking believes every single stupid, hateful thing that my bloody parents cooked up- he thinks all those who're _inferior _to him, to _them_ should be chucked off a cliff for all it matters, he's cold and selfish and heartless and...he..he..." Sirius broke off, dark eyes flashing, two spots of colour on his high cheekbones, mouth opening and closing uselessly and fists clenching by his sides, like even his regular eloquence couldn't find enough words, the right words, to do their loved one justice. That thin mouth twisted up, tight and colourless, like issuing the last judgement. "He isn't worth it."

The words were quiet. "Still waiting on you to say something I don't know, here."

Sirius' eyebrows shot up, a mix of incredulity and indignation, words liberally sprinkled with scorn. "Yet you're still continuing with this? You're wasting your _time, _Frank. He can't be changed. He's beyond all change." An uglier twist of the mouth. "Learned nothing from Evans, did you? Her best buddy Snivelly called her a Mudblood in front of the whole school."

"Good thing I'm not a Muggleborn then." Frank returned back, undisturbed, almost kindly.

Sirius flushed, teeth digging viciously into the lip, as if only realising his slip of tongue now. His next sentence was an acrimonious flurry of arrows. "He wouldn't even have deigned to _talk _to you if you weren't a Pureblood."

"And you wouldn't have gone near James if he was a Death Eater."

"You can't choose not to be a Muggleborn." Sirius took two steps forward, knuckles whitened at the edges, jagged red stretching out from the corner of his eyelids to reach his irises. "But you _can _choose not to be a Death Eater."

"Exactly." Frank's gaze remained steady, lips flickering up in the ghost of a smile.

Sirius made an aborted sound, catching in his throat, face drawing up in frustration- and Frank cut through, calm and unyielding, intent on getting this out once and for all. "I wasn't a social worker at thirteen, Sirius. I didn't befriend your brother with the premeditated intent of _reforming _him." His lips pressed down on themselves for a second, the only expression of feeling he'd allow himself right now. "He has his own head. He has the capability, the right to think and believe whatever the heck he wants."

_Hypocrite._

But no, not really. There _had_ been scattered moments of disquiet, anger at meaningless prejudices, anger at such a brilliant mind being shackled by beliefs that didn't befit it; but friends were meant to conflict. There was no point of sharing a part of you with a friend if you had the same parts to share. Same parts didn't lead to growth. And no matter what bits of him felt, the larger part knew that Reg deserved the freedom to have his right to think, his right to decide respected...-unless he wasn't safe. Unless he wounded others. Unless he destroyed himself.

"_...you'd never be like them."_

Frank turned and walked, flagstones echoing hollowly beneath his soles, and heard a quiet, almost indecisive voice call out to him. "Wait."

He looked back. Sirius had emerged from the shelter of the pillar, slouched back straightening, long hands darted down to tug at a stray thread from his jacket cuff. Without the shadows casting half his face into darkness, the flickering light from the braziers mounted on the walls revealing all blemishes, the disinherited Black seemed...less, somehow. Less tall, less imposing, less certain. Stripped down of all pedestals, real or conjured.

There was something tender, almost discomfitingly painful about that voice. Not wavering though, not in the slightest. "Why are you friends with him then?"

Frank lifted his eyes to the pair opposite them, clear and grey and familiar; and smiled. "For the same reasons your friends are with you, I suppose."

_Because they see you._

Turning again, his feet marked the distance of the corridor, heels dragging against the cracks, leaving a Black standing alone and irresolute in the centre of the corridor. He turned the corner, and the hastily bit-off swear followed by the outward hiss of pain as his entire body knocked against, and his shin came into contact with something very, very hard resounded quite loudly in the empty passage.

The other person, was louder. "D'you even know who I _am, _you mangy little-"

Eyes shining with the compressed pain, Frank backed up, blinking rapidly to dull the sharp pinprick behind the lids- and stopped, teeth coming together to close behind his lips in an inaudible snap. It was like someone had hacked into the end of the word, severing it off abruptly. "Bellatrix."

Bellatrix scowled, and nearly toppled his feet by the force of her wrenching at the downward hem of her robe, purple sleeve falling back on white skin as her dueler's hands dusted off the almost imperceptibly shimmering cloth stretched across her shoulders- a place he hadn't even touched, but of course, Merlin forbid if blood traitor germs would infect her clothes and cause the Moste Horrendous disease of human-itis. And all the while while his shin was contemplating spontaneous suicide. God, did the woman have Cyborg knees or something? She certainly sounded inhuman enough for it, the muttering going on and on, "-stupid wretch, lumbering on with those troll legs, putrid flesh-"

"Troll legs?" His voice repeated, unable to help itself, but Bellatrix was onto the collar of the robes now, the almost Empress like cut delving down in a sharp V to reveal unadorned collar bones- and now she was turning round, knuckles almost viciously scrubbing at the waistline, another place he might add his 'putrid flesh' most certainly never made contact with- "-should have them exterminated from the civilised world and flayed inch to inch-" and her scapulae stood out sharply in relief against the sheer black net that stretched across the entirety of her back, a scorpion in denser black lace embroidered in the space between the shoulder blades, lethal black stinger arching up to curl around her neck- and she whirled, cheekbones high and patrician enough to carve stone, dark lashes resting atop heavy, almost royal eyelids, whitened skin with blue blooded veins crawling underneath, carriage nothing of the Lady and almost entirely of the Warrior, eyes the most searing shade of jet black- and for a second past the disgust veiling his mind, Frank thought he might understand the whole Black genes thing Regulus kept whinging on about all the time, after all.

"What?" Cut through the air as swift as a blade forged of ice, and something colder settled into his heart, a low swooping feeling from first and second and third and all those powerless years, because _fuck _what had he just thought- now he could see nothing past only the inescapableness of the black irises, the way they sucked all light in and refused to let any out. Bellatrix's lips curled into a little sneer. "What is your puny mind thinking? Is it unable to grasp the shock of seeing me in something other than the glorious green and silver of Salazar Slytherin, or mercy forbid, soul-rotting black?"

"Well." Frank felt his voice contribute, unable to form anything else. It was a bit of a shock, to see the Bellatrix Black who once perused the last leaves of his mind at leisure like a particularly amusing book, so horrible and blatantly off the mark. His own mind would no doubt forget the mark in a couple more minutes, discarding it as a particularly traumatising nightmare.

"Since your philistine of a mind is so clearly unable to grasp, let me attempt to enlighten." That blood curdling smile curved up those dratted lips again. "Purple happens to be the king's hue. A mark of superiority." Long-boned fingers stroked down the length of the fine cloth, black nearly, the colour of the tart skin of the richest, ripest, darkest plum seconds before plucking, lighter dispersed threads of reddish purple glinting in the light here and there like lifeblood veins. Bellatrix threw her hair back, chin lifting in arrogance. "The colour of royalty. Nobility."

Several seconds traipsed by without a sound. Bellatrix's high brows seemed to pull together for one second in confusion, abrasive voice even more demanding than usual. "_What_?"

Not a word. His feet pivoted on their heels to turn for the third time in as many minutes that day, and he walked on, regardless of the insulted intake of breath behind him and the almost certainly fatal retribution that would be waiting for him the night of the next session because of this act. He walked, and the window panes rattled in their frames, the biting wind sneaking in through their crevices to elicit goosbumps across his skin, the outside fog constructing wispy fingers to caress the glass lovingly. The sounds from the Great Hall, which his feet were moving toward, sounds of voices and forks clinking on plates and glasses clinking on each other were getting louder by the second.

His mind felt strangely blank. 

* * *

><p>The sharp ends raked across his scalp, puncturing sore skin, and his eyes burned. His neck jerked, tendons straining in the neck as his head tried to twist to the side, out of that godforsaken grasp- but it tightened, inexorable, merciless. His fists darted out, knuckles flying wildly, knees bruised and struggling against the hard ground in vain, dirt streaking hopelessly past his socks, smearing into the thighs of his trousers. He could feel it, wet and sticky and mixing with the perspiration to cake the material, crusting and stiffening and cracking every time he struck out.<p>

One last swing at what felt like the empty air, and the grip was pulling, tightening, threatening to wrench the follicles out by their roots, and his eyes closed tighter than the blind's, unable to make out the difference, stinging like a thousand wasp stings. His exhales were loud and harsh into the deafened night air, chest seizing constantly, but no other sound escaped his lips, vocal cords clamped down tight. He wouldn't allow it.

"You're. Not. Seeing." The forceful, almost savage hiss pierced his eardrums, and he could barely hear the exhaustion in her own voice, from holding him down, past the untempered, unquenchable rage. "Open your eyes, you pathetic worthless cretin-"

"There's no _light._" The words fought their way out past his teeth despite himself, acrid and bitten and undeniably restrained. "How the bl- _how_ do you expect me to-"

"Magic doesn't _need _light you silly little boy." Cold and contemptuous and pitiless. His hair literally ached when that knotting, unforgiving grip was released, but hard palms soon made their way to either side of his temples, shaking his head hard as if vainly expecting to hear something clatter around in the cranium that at present, appeared to be a yawning hole of rubble and nothingness. "Only useless Muggles are limited by the limitations of their body. Let your magic see _for_ you, you fool."

The pain behind his eyelids blazed and in a long-awaited, burst of movement- he snapped his head free, ringing in pain with the sudden movement, hanging free with his chin down his collar, supported by vertebrae in a neck that seemed to scream in agony with every inch of attempted lifting. The darkness beyond his eyelids started shifting, less dense and almost lighter- and Frank opened his eyes and saw silver lined grass crushed under his knees, waving between the grime encrusted nails of his fingers, edged with moonlit dewdrops that gleamed too brightly, almost painfully after the absolute darkness.

"Worthless. Absolutely worthless." The stubborn fuck in him raised his chin enough for his neck to decide that muscles could in fact, be torn beyond repair by overuse, and his still bleary eyes to make out the outline of her- black hair thrown up messily into a bun sticking to the skin with sweat, black working robes that seemed absolutely impeccable except the two rips of thread at the hem where his hands had caught at half an hour ago- existing for half an hour without sight, oh Merlin the absolute _bitch_- and slumped gracelessly against the wooden bark of the beech, features overcast with such a thunderous cloud of displeasure that the nearby bushes were going to be struck down by lightning any minute. Frank had not a whit of patience, or spare thought not coloured by frustration to wonder why in the name of all that was holy was Bellatrix Black so invested in him learning this. Or anything else till now, actually.

"Wilfred Elphick would have done better." Bellatrix kicked her heels, hooking an ankle around another in an action that Sirius performed every night over the squishy armchair near the common room fire. The weeds tickled the soles of her bare feet.

"Disagreed." The strain that single word put his vocal cords through was entirely worth the most incensed glower Bellatrix hurled his way not a second later. His palms felt for the cool earth, toecaps turning vertical, poising to push his limbs to unfold and rise. "As utterly imbecilic as I'm sure the act of _not being able to see in the dark_ might be, I'm quite sure being gored by an Erumpent trumps it any day."

There was a minute flicker behind the dirty look, almost like surprise at the recognition of the reference. Purebloods.

"Archibald Alderton then." Bellatrix appeared too...well of course it would be blasphemy to used the word 'tired'...but, well...mildly fatigued to roll out that life sappingly saccharine voice. Regardless, it was overdue time for him to store up on insulin injections.

"The one who blew up the hamlet of Little Dropping while trying to mix a birthday cake? Yes, of course. His egg-whisking and batter-making abilities must be just _legendary_. Very helpful for night vision." His haunches shook when he rose, knees threatening to buckle for a second, but a quick step forward remedied that. Tottering yes, but his feet were at least moving a step at a time.

"Thaddeus Thurkel." Maybe not. Canines gleamed over pale lips as Bellatrix bared a smile of sickening proportions, just for his pleasure. Just simply _oozing _with go-on-and-say-it-then.

"The father of the seven Squib sons." Frank smiled back evenly. "Blind as a bat as well simply on account of being human, not his sons."

"_I _can see perfectly well." Bellatrix's smile smoothened into an unassailable facade of self assuredness.

"Precisely my point." His feet didn't shake once, at all, as he walked the fifth time from the mark to the shore of the Lake and back.

Even if he couldn't see her face, the bitten off annoyance in that voice was unmistakable. She threw the words down like a challenge. "Gondoline Oliphant."

Pivot on the heel and walk back again. "Troll expert clubbed to death by trolls, again not much of a claim to being able to see in Peruvian Instant Darkne-"

"Dorcas Wellbeloved."

"Unless she founded the Society for Distressed Witches because she was able to catch her husband _inflagrante delicto _despite poor visibility conditions-"

"Xavier Rastrick." Yes, that was most certainly through gritted teeth.

"Famous wizard entertainer, vanished unexpectedly while tap dancing to a crowd of 300 in Painswick-" What, did the Black family research on all the laughing stocks of history, making contingency plans as to avoid ever going in that direction?

"Musidora Barkwi-." The words were being flung out like a whip.

"Composer, born 1520, died 1666, most famous for composing the unfinished 'Wizarding Suite' which features an exploding tuba." Frank finished, and smiled; and if it was with half the amount of satisfaction that usually oozes out of a Bellatrix Black Special, his purpose in life is complete. The next sentence is rather redundant, but he was on a roll, and the little curve at the end of his smile which makes it a bit smirk-ish does little to counteract it. "Now if the tuba has something to do with increased retinal capacity-"

"How in the name of Salazar do you _remember _all this?" Bellatrix had thrown her weight on her heels, hands propped on folded knees, eyes narrowed and words so utterly vexed and at the end of their tether that Frank might award himself a medal in private later on.

"Tutored by your cousin. Master of tough love, that one." Although Regulus would insist on him being incapable of smugness, Frank was sure that the word was a pretty good description for the glorious feeling running through his bones right now, erasing all residual phantom aches. It was brilliant, no wonder these Blacks strutted around chock-full of it all the time. "Also, by oft overlooked, happy circumstance, I happen to be a Pureblood."

He might be completely, absolutely wrong, but Frank had this strong feeling that if she were capable of it, Bellatrix Black would be dropping her face, obscuring it behind her arms right now. Rather, that strong-featured, impassive face turned away to the side, words escaping resentful and muted as if they already knew they would be useless. "Felix Summerbee."

"Famed inventor of-" Frank started, then broke off, voice trailing into the thoughtful. "...actually he _would _be better than me at this."

The black head whirled around, dark eyes pinning him, eyebrows shooting up and voice crossing over into incredulity. "He invented _Cheering Charms._" The last words were pronounced like they were the vilest things known to the world of men.

"Which is why he'd cast one at you while you're prancing about showering Darkness powder everywhere, then you'd catch a glimpse of your reflection in the water, get a heart attack, and die on the spot."

Bellatrix stared.

In a flash of rather spectacularly timed realisation, Frank remembered the first name of the Black before him was not Regulus. Sanity outside the head was thereby imperative. What were the odds that the first person he'd end up lapsing in front of was Bellatrix I-eat-Basilisks-for-breakfast Black?

This time, Bellatrix did actually obscure her face in her arms, though it was more of a leaning of her cheek on the sleeve, watching the Giant Squid's tentacles lap at the surface of the Lake, in a disdainful I-can't-be-bothered-with-this-idiocy-any-longer move. Regardless, prompted by a glimpse of the features before they were hidden by darker locks of hair, it was rather disconcerting to realise that a Cheering Charm was actually not required to bring a semblance of a smile to Bellatrix Black's perennially sneering features. Also, it appeared that this particular theory of his wasn't as inane as all the rest. Judging by the organ that had started to life under his chest, pounding away at the wall steadily; a smile on Bellatrix Black's face could cause heart attacks.

The boat was rocking slowly, casting almost indiscernible ripples against the shadowed water, moon white and gibbous. Yet his blood still seemed to vibrate beneath his skin, in complete conflict with the apparent tranquility outside. It had seemed to erupt into mutiny, adrenaline a constant pinprick against his senses, making him restless and his muscles wired and his feet cross and uncross uselessly several times in the last few minutes. Every time he did this, the dark haired woman at the other end of the vessel, barely a metre away would shoot him a quenching look under her heavy lids- but this wasn't under his control to stop.

There was something very, very weighted in the air, and Frank was under no delusions that this wasn't because it was a warm summer night in the middle of July, the hypnotising drone of insects emanating from the rushes at the banks and permeating the air, foggy heat resting heavily against their skins, the prospect of it being the last month of his schooling resting heavier. If there was someone more restless than him, it was Bellatrix- though she showed it by sitting straighter, stance perfectly set like that of a predator, turning her wand over and over between fingers and an ever tightening grip. She'd been stormily silent all evening, pointing brusquely at the long prowed, wooden boat anchored at the shore of the Black Lake the moment he'd arrived, short of breath and disheveled and running late, "Sit."; and driving the boat with barely a flick of her wand, eyes fixed somewhere far into the distance. It had only served to make his skin prickle further, stomach twist tighter- and now that the boat thunked to a sudden halt and he was jerked back to reality, noticing they'd reached the approximate centre, it was strange to realise that he couldn't remember a moment in his life where he'd been more drawn tight at the ends by tension, and a strictly unnameable feeling coiling in the gut.

"We've been at this for months, and your ineptitude is still as strong as ever." The silence was broken, and Frank, in some little corner of his mind, surprised himself by parting through the veil of insults and contempt to find the tiny, never-before-spoken word '_we'_. Bellatrix seemed absolutely oblivious to this as always, winding a coil of hair around an index finger in an uncharacteristic motion, skin whitening with lack of circulation as the strand tightened progressively, surely causing spasms of pain at the scalp. "Your pathetic little dreams will be shattered the second you step out of this place- with this level of dedication to being utterly useless, you're not going to be accepted anywhere."

And there it was, again, one contributor to the unease curling in his bloodstream. If he'd ever had any false impressions that all of this was being done in order to get him to pass the Auror tests, it had been disposed of a long time ago. Dark eyes swiveled and caught on his for a second, and for that second it was like his worst apprehensions being confirmed. His tongue moved without his permission, "I think tattoos are declasse, anyway."

Bellatrix's lip twitched very, very violently, an expression of ill-hidden amusement that still seemed to make a mixture of shock and wonder filter faintly into his system; and then she lunged forward, twisting his chin beneath her grasp, dark eyes flashing, breath warm and venomous and not at all steady. "If you think we'd take in a blood traitor like you-"

"For someone so _disgusted _by my blood traitor flesh," Frank breathed harshly, and stared back, and for once controlled absolutely nothing. "-you sure like getting up close and personal, don't you?"

She shoved him back, and he fell- and the cold water on the muggy night was like a shock to the system, soaking through his heavy, cumbersome robes in a matter of seconds. His head disappeared beneath the surface, body suspended in the currentless water, a pulse beneath his clouded eardrums alerting to the increasing pressure- and then he rose, nose breaking the surface a second later, eyes burning, mouth parting to presumably express the coagulating mixture of anger and frustration and confusion blocking his chest. But upon blinking stray droplets out of the eyes, drawing lungfuls of oxygen into his squeezing lungs, arms batting at the water to keep him afloat; he could only see familiar black grains trickling into the water, land and trees and moon and her eyes all blurring into one, the visible world shutting itself out.

_Not fucking again._ He felt more than heard the first curse whizzing past him, making the patch of water close to his sodden sleeve boil, almost beyond human tolerance. He ducked his head, shoulders hunching under the sudden movement, feet still kicking; and the next hex singed the hairs off his head, leaving the water hissing in its trail. The next few minutes were a quick, heavy-limbed, frantically twisting, watery blur of trying to avoid curses like dodging droplets in a rainshower and struggling to break the surface and snatch air in brief, interrupted bouts. He didn't know how long he'd been in the water before his limbs started to tire, drawn down by the heavy weight of the water drenched robes, muscles burning with lactic acid. Every gulp seemed more water and less air now, chest starting to ache, head dangerously light and heavy with the progressive lack of oxygen. The roar in his ears was deafening, like a train's engine thundering across the tracks a centimetre away threatening to puncture the fragile eardrum, his head sunk back on his neck, mouth parting in a gasp towards the sky- and he didn't have that deadly of a fucking aim even in broad daylight dammit, for then his throat swallowed the curse whole.

It seemed to incinerate the inner lining of his gut, acid peeling away the internal muscle strip by strip, and his body convulsed in the choking, suffocating water, seeming not to have enough energy even to thrash- and it seemed bloody impossible but the pain in the eyes overshadowed all of it, two gaping cauterised wounds smoking on the surface. They squeezed tighter, the taste of vile, familiar magic resting thickly against the back of his tongue, and the images broke- lips drawn wide as knowing eyes and the same magic pulled threads of the deepest, most desperate thoughts of a child out into the open to poke and jeer at, the condescending grip and the heated breath on his jaw that lingered now even past the moisture slicked skin, the upward curve of that mouth that bold, unassailable Bellatrix Black tried so hard to hide- and his eyes _burned _and his hand shot out of the water to stave off the sinking, catching on and wrapping around something cold and damp and unbreakable.

There was a pulse, a slight quiver 'neath the skin just at the centre of the bone between his two eyes, and they flew open- and Frank felt the magic, the force ripple out in _waves_, skimming the surface of the water with unparalleled speed, dissipating far, far out in the distance. The world shot almost immediately into focus, a negatives-like tapestry of greys and blacks and blues, the moon blindingly white, the sky and water merging seamlessly into a black expanse of ink, and he looked up and saw a pale wrist caught in the fingers of his own.

"There." He looked, and magic had never made Bellatrix's face look clearer. There were water-sodden locks clinging to her neck, her chin, plastered over her eyelids, colourless drops running down her jaw, holding fast to the perspiring skin, lips almost transparent, eyes large and black and he'd been a fool to think it was an empty colour: it was the deepest, most entrapping one he'd ever known, a steaming cesspool, a swirling typhoon, savage and reckless and bright. Sheer charged triumph, vindication and the _something _ran raw in that voice, interrupted in between by panting breaths. "_There_. Do you see me now?"

"Yeah." His numbed lips moved, and liquid magic flowed beneath the skin of his eyelids, and Frank's throat felt disused and strange for reasons entirely disconnected to the curse. "I do." 

* * *

><p>Blasted blasted <em>blasted <em>Dementors.

He didn't remember feeling warm for a very, very long time now. Heat was a scarce commodity, rarer in the heart than even in the safest, most sheltered corners of their homes. But then again, no one was really safe now, anywhere. Father, brother, child, all could turn against one another, polluted by the putrefying stench of suspicion if not anything else. It had filtered into them too: comrades, brothers-in-arms, apparently invincible in their love for one another. How love could be wielded as a double-edged blade, wounding far more often than it healed, fear rotting the very core of what made it warm. The pubs were gone now, they cracked jokes in the dilapidated headquarters of the week, and waited for someone to take offense; drank to drown the fears than to amplify the happiness, shook hands and clapped on backs and recounted old tales and watched all the while with twitchy eyes, looking over the backs, smiles hollower than an acorn corroded on the inside. The clawing fear, the never ending wait for betrayal hacked at them worse than any betrayal possibly could- because nothing was certain now, in this new world. Not the love of a brother who you used to share your sandwiches with, nor the trust of a comrade who used to watch your back during pranks, nor the loyalties of a friend who knew you were everything against what he stood for but used to believe you were the best man he'd ever met anyway.

The only time he'd feel the gentlest of thaw to the arctic temperatures, was when he'd rub his thumb over the inner end of his wife's wrist, or hold his baby son in his arms. The cold didn't seem ever encompassing then, when Neville snuffled into his chest and waved stubby fingers at the ceiling, and Alice slumped into the nearby rocking chair, smiling at them tiredly. It almost seemed worth it, then. Worth the long patrols on grey pavements, icy water soaking into your socks, vision wiped of colour, just umbrellas of indiscernible shapes as the dreary heavens rained down till it seemed the entire world would be washed away, like a water colour painting. Worth the eight hour long stake outs outside the most populous Muggle places, waiting for the screams to start and the curses to start flashing like strobe lights and the skull to break out over the sky, gaping maw looming over the structure of brick-and-stone whose inhabitants it had swallowed this time. Worth the living from skirmish to skirmish, spending nights on porches with your spine digging uncomfortably into the wood, staring meaninglessly at the graffiti spelling swear words against the soot-streaked wall stones of the alleyway, wondering if the ninety-year old grandmother from next door just stepping out to put out her rubbish was under Polyjuice. If the children that had been playing tag in the backyard that morning who you were protecting would make it through the night. Almost worth kissing his wife goodbye at the door in the beginning of each day, pressing Neville's blanket into her callused, battle-weary hands if it was her turn for a stake out that night, because the smell of milk and new life was comforting and had kept them going through many a thunderstorm, when it seemed like your lumbering heart might finally tire miles deep under your chest, a frozen bit of muscle working on and on endlessly on a worthless errand. Worth maybe even handing over his child to his mother on the days both him and Alice had to go, beforehand steadily tilting the bottle into those tiny pink little lips, hands careful not to let a dribble of milk leak through- because Neville refused to be fed by anyone else; those very hands that would clean crusted blood from beneath its fingernails later that night. Worth being children trying so hard to be adults, children bravely laughing and mocking and exchanging fistpumps before a fight, children that had no idea what they were doing. A batch of nineteen, twenty, twenty one year olds the only defense the world had to offer against Death.

The earth was solid iron beneath his feet, his heartbeat a thundering, desperate pound in his ears, ticking out the seconds- robes uselessly whipping round his ankles, hand slick and cold with sweat around his wand of wood. Damn Anti-Apparition wards, the grey field to the distance still appeared several futile kilometres away, the burning trees faint pinpricks of light in the haze- but that did nothing to stop the ever-growing sounds of war: scuffles, screams, the hiss and curl of lifetaking curses cutting through the air, sounds of bodies crashing through the undergrowth. A part of him wished to falter, it always did, to whip his back around and run for his mother's home and gather up the little bundle of blankets and baby in his arms that would be enough for him to live- take him and disappear, far, far away, where skull tattoos would be rebellious acts by teenagers in attempts to look cool, nothing more, where there wouldn't be fog in July, where he wouldn't have to pull back the hoods of the every black robed Death Eater in the pile of cold bodies after a battle with fingers that wouldn't shake, looking for sightless grey eyes. But his feet wouldn't be that part to falter, they never would and he hated them for it, and didn't know what he would do without because he reached the field in time; it had to be time, his mind couldn't cope with the other possibility- because _Alice. _Alice_, _his heart thrummed, hand flinging forward to push open the broken-down black gate, screeching through the rust- Alice, the girl, the mother of his child- his boots squelched through the mud, fog looming up of a sudden and swallowing him whole, congealing in his lungs with every inhale- she was here, Alice was here, he needed to get her out and nothing else mattered- and suddenly he was in the thick of the fight.

It sneaked up on him, grey clouds called by monsters, descended to the earth to burn their eyes, turn their perspiration to ice, make their wands quiver in their numbed, insensate fingers. It was impossible to understand anything of the fight but to know that he was in the middle of it, jets of black and green and red the only remotely visible things through the sight-stealing mist, gasps and the sounds of falling bodies muffled and choked by its grasp. A Dementor stole up on him before long, seven feet tall creature rising a sudden before his eyes, materialising as if out of nothing- and a white, long-bodied apparition with nothing discernible but a corporeal stinger plowed out of his wand through that rattling mouth, and Frank's boots kicked the remnant tattered pieces of black cloth out their way, fluttering to the mud. But the white air was still strangely solid, dormantly malevolent, his eyes burned and Frank let it come- let the sparks scorch along his eyelids and part through the solid air as if with a scythe, vision clearing in blacks and greys and blues, the only one who could discern friend from foe in a twisting muddle of Light and Dark, Order and Death Eater.

He felled three more in the next fifteen minutes, bodies dropping soundlessly to the mud, but in a scattered battleground of black robes where a second's hesitation to properly confirm a face could cost you your future with your child, he had nothing but a single-minded fierceness to forget about costs, forget about checking if he had indeed killed the right one (they'd stopped Stunning months ago), trust in his magic and _search. _For all the advantage that his vision gave him, it was still limited to a frustratingly small perimeter, like a Lumos lit within his irises- and every friendly, trembling shoulder he squeezed for the fraction of a second, every limping friend he supported to the relative sidelines, every white, desperate face he glimpsed in that field: none were Alice.

He saw Marlene fall, a twisting ragdoll held aloft in the air by a sickening jet of purple that cored through the square of her back, then drop- and he killed Wilkes with a bare thought, life draining green sweeping out of his wand of rowan like a tidal wave. Her body was heavy, wearing across the muscle of his shoulder, her limp feet dragging through the mud- and he tucked her wand into his pocket, just in case the battle was lost and they couldn't recover the bodies later: her mum deserved something to keep. Left her lying behind a bush of gorse, head propped on his folded cloak, blonde strands of hair draggled in the puddle water; unfolded his knees to rise to his feet- and then he saw them.

They were underneath one of the largest trees that the Death Eaters had set on fire, whose black branches were still flaming up high, showering scalding, red-hot embers to the ground as it creaked and cried in the wind, but the two women seemed to pay it no mind. Alice had shed her cloak, or maybe it had been torn from her back- she was clutching her right arm, apparently staving off a wound, and the pale blue, flickering light of her shield was barely espied through the storm that danced around her: inhuman speeds, tearaway black hair, pale lips pulled to an almost manic smile, black walnut shooting one _Crucio _after the other. Though the fog was much abated by the red-orange glow of the howling fire feeding on the willow above them, Alice could do little more than defend against Bellatrix's rampage and better sight. With every blow, the light seemed to get fainter, and the Lestrange's savage joy seemed to mount.

But it seemed she'd forgotten, just as he almost had, that there was someone else standing in this godforsaken plain of hell in the middle of nowhere who knew how to see. His wand rose, aim unerring and true, incantation half spoken by damp lips that barely flickered in the grey light of dawn.

But then the light, pale, almost electric blue, dazzled bright for a second like the flame of a candle leaping high for a last time before being snuffed- and died out completely, and he could see Bellatrix stop short then bare her teeth wide in a smile, but it had been a light bulb popping off, not a splutter, which meant the shield hadn't failed, Alice had dropped- oh _god _Alice, brilliant, brilliant Alice, he'd recognise that peculiar twist of the wrist, that wand movement anywhere, gold light would span out of her wand in a wave a second later, a two metre radius. With the Anti-Apparition wards, there was no escape for Bellatrix, none at all.

His lips closed around the unwieldy Latin syllables, incantation complete, venomous blue gathering itself around the base of the wand, heating his callused hand, rushing towards the tip- and his steady hand, controlled hand, the hand that never missed, never let anyone down- twitched to the left by three inches just as Alice had parted her lips to incant. The world was struck silent, everything quenched and forced still, till even across the distance, he could hear the sharp intake of breath as a black-covered chest drew in and blacker eyes swiveled, shocked and wide, tearing across the waving grain and the mud and the fog and the fallen bodies to his own.

The scream of his wife rending through the silence, a heavy, cold, hollow thud as a body hit the ground; rung in his ears for hours afterwards. 

* * *

><p>"<em>James and...the others are coming." <em>

_Silence. Mindshattering silence._

"_Is she...are you-"_

"_No." He couldn't hear his voice over the screaming._

"_It wasn't your fault." Words, words, they were all words, meaningless words, yet words could kill without thinking,"You weren't to know, everything was in chaos, none of us could __**see**__-"_

"_And that's supposed to make it better." The fact that no one could see, no one had seen, no one would ever know; and the screaming grew louder._

"_You__** weren't to know**__. We couldn't see our hands before our faces in the fo-" A hand offering comfort curled into the trouser material at his knee, and he could feel bile, black and thick, rise at the back of his throat. Another voice spoke at the back of his head, gloriously young, what felt like lifetimes ago- '...because you'd never be like them.' and yes he had proved it, he wasn't like them, he wasn't like them at all..."-you know she is, but she can't hold her own in front of Bellatrix and you heard them and its only obvious you did what you did and..."_

_Obvious. Had it been obvious, all this while? The only corporeal part of his Patronus that looked strangely like a stinger, the spell that he used every night to keep watch and yet taught to no one, Regulus' misplaced belief in everything that was wrong except Frank; and yet he was wrong too, worth nothing of the blind, unquestioning respect he'd been given._

"_...and you missed. You hit the wrong target. That's it."_

"_The wrong target was my wife." Absolutely, completely wrong. He knew it, he'd always known it. Why could he not have acted on it, then?_

"_And both of you will get through this." And Frank felt like laughing, tilting his head back and letting the sounds rip free from his accursed throat. "This was the third time you defied Voldemort. You can't let go now."_

_But that was the thing, wasn't it? He thought he had seen. He thought the fog had lifted, and he'd finally been able to pare down to the truth. And he had never let go. But the fog was treacherous, showing lights where there were none, letting him see what he wanted to see- like the mist in a crystal ball. Things that were not real- the boy beneath the coldness, the girl beneath the madness. A blind seer._

"_I defied nothing."_

* * *

><p>The walls were white.<p>

The walls were white: that expanse of blandness, emptiness that he was almost proud he'd remembered the name of- but Frank disliked them. They were canvases wiped clean of all marks, all impressions- no matter how many times George from bed 243 scribbled on them, drew castles and hills and valleys, the house elves mopped it up during the night and they were gone. Like a story someone had tried painfully to write, and somebody else had just wiped a wet sponge through, and there. Everything gone. Nothing to remind you there'd been something else.

The walls were white, the tiles were white, the ceiling white, sheets white, dressing gowns white- sometimes he felt like he remembered no colour else. Sometimes at night he'd pretend to tuck his head under the pillowcase and snore peacefully when the woman in the lime green robes passed by; then he'd prop his head on his head, stare at the ceiling and imagine it black. He knew the night sky outside was black, sometimes he'd catch glimpes of it when the men and women with sticks and spectacles and hushed, rapidly muttering voices made an emergency night visit, like when the light hovering over Edla Emerson's chest had turned red, and she had shook incontrollably and twisted and convulsed in place like an invisible force was pulling her apart bit by bit. He'd imagine spots on it too, and he knew they were called stars- and he was happy, even though he didn't have a very good imagination because he always imagined the stars in exactly the same places. Two there, three here, a lone bright one just there - "o_nly the brightest star in the heavens for my imbecile of a brother of course" - _a little trapezium like shape if you joined all the dots together, but no matter how many times he did it, it still felt good. Like a ...a ... talisman. Yes. A part of what was Out There that was still there, but somehow hadn't left him.

Something...no, wrong word, wrong word...someone. Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and Frank raised his head from the little shadowed corner behind his bed where he was huddled, limbs hunched awkwardly, from where he'd been scratching lines and dots into the tile with his piece of charcoal. Seeing it was so out of the way, he hoped the house elves might forget to clean it someday- and that day when he'd wake with things trying to overflow out of his head, instead of letting them all seep through in the first few minutes of wakefulness like grains of sand, he'd look at the drawing and he'd...remember. Everything would slot into place, would be...right, no matter what that was supposed to mean. It hadn't happened yet, and he spent every day in gathering up the grains again, carefully ladling them in the palm of his hand, tenuously holding on to the dots and lines. Someday.

Someone tapped him and he raised his head, and a pale faced, dark haired boy was there, standing. Frank looked back, and his lips moved. "Regulus?"

He didn't know what Regulus was. He didn't know what it meant. The boy didn't seem to know either, his brows clouding together with confusion and something else that made the lines on his young face stand out darker, more drawn out. But then dark eyes flickered down to the little pictogram on the floor, then up again, then down- and brown irises widened and that thin little mouth quivered in a strange way, and before Frank could know it, the boy was running out of the room, calling out in a thin, high, reedy voice. "Gran! Gran!"

Frank was starting to feel uneasy, his overlarge hands smoothed down the goosepimpled skin of his arms, he didn't want people to know, he didn't want them finding out- to bring that wet sponge and wipe it all way, erasing, cleaning, rubbing...gone. He'd sit on the picture but it would smudge, and by now the boy was back anyway, thin fingers fastened around a spotty wrist that belonged to an old woman with a birdstuffed hat; tugging and pulling and the woman sighed, in part annoyance, "-what is it now Neville..."

Neville...yes. That was the name of the boy. Frank didn't know he'd been waiting to learn it, but memorise it he did, and resolved to remember it: though unbeknownst to him, he'd made the same promise yesterday. And the day before that. Neville tugged the woman over to Frank's corner behind the bed and pointed, sounding oddly excited, eyes bright around the corners, "Look! Look!"

The woman's eyes fell on him, and something strange passed over them, and Frank didn't like it at all. Something almost glassy, and the woman pulled her lower lip in for a brief moment before directing an almost wearied look to Neville. "Your father is squatting on the floor, I noticed. So?"

"No no, look at what he drew!" Neville's lips were beginning to curve, like he wanted to smile but didn't quite know how.

"Scribbles on the tiles-"

"No, they're not _scribbles_." Neville fell to his knees, marking out the dots and the lines with a filed fingernail hovering over the tile, as if hardly daring to in fear of spoiling them. "That's Regulus. In Leo, that is. He...D-Dad told me himself." He almost glowed, turning his head around and above to direct a brilliantly, almost fragilely entreating look towards the woman. "That's Regulus."

"Oh dear." The woman smiled faintly, the way Healer Jensen did whenever Frank asked for a chess set, as if something about him was so incredibly sad that they had to smile about it, above it all. She outstretched a hand and pulled Neville to his feet, patting his shoulder after in that horribly sym...s...sympathetic way like she understood but couldn't do anything about it. "Just because your father remembered a scrap of his Astronomy classes..."

"That means he might slowly remember other things, mightn't he?" The tone was hopeful, but Neville was already beginning to deflate, the sudden smoothness in his face lining up again, the corners of his eyes fading out; and Frank didn't know why that made his heart feel cold, but it did.

"Come along now, dear." The woman smiled again, in the gentlest tone she'd used yet; and turned away, soles of slippers slapping against the tiles as she walked away, to Out There. Neville took a step or two behind her, and Frank dropped his gaze back to his drawing again, already withdrawing from the events of the past few minutes, thinking if there'd been a fifth dot. No, not as far as he could tell, but-

Something gathered his oversized hands, scrunched as they were around the tiny piece of charcoal- and Frank flinched and gazed up widely, watching brown eyes look steadily into his own. The boy, Neville, had his fingers wrapped around Frank's, tightening them when they began to shake; and maybe Frank didn't want to visit Out There after all, if everyone there was this strange. He didn't understand, didn't understand any of it at all- and not understanding sometimes made the old pain that still often paralysed his limbs flare.

"I'll get her back for what she did." Neville said, something dark and undeniable and thick shimmering in his eyes, and Frank blinked back, blankly. "I'll get her back for you. I promise."

**A/N: One more to go.**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: And we come to the end. Review?**

Bellatrix Lestrange nee Black

_Born 27__th__ August 1954_

_Died 2__nd__ May 1998_

"_Neville Longbottom, isn't it? How's mum and dad?"_

Bellatrix Black wasn't here to narrate her life story.

She didn't believe life was a story anyway. It wasn't meant to be lived out of seconds in an hour, days in a week, months in a year. Wasn't meant to be gamboled away, sticking your head out of train windows to feel the breeze, kicking your feet in the cool, still water. No, life wasn't the important thing here at all. What was important was the use it was put to.

The objective. The motive. The mission. Whatever you call it. They were so much greater than mere human lives- a cause for which prices of blood, sweat, tears would be given...and she'd give them willingly. Labels made her feel so much bigger than what she was: a five foot nine inch tall, black haired woman. No...she was a Black. A soon to be Lestrange. A Slytherin, an initiate Death Eater, the first _woman _Death Eater, the Dark Lord's most faithful. Yes...that uplifted her existence to so much _more. _She didn't how the birdbrained, puny others lived without it.

But if she was here to tell her story. If. She'd start from somewhere close to the beginning: like when her Father gifted her her first grimoire. Or her first flight on a broomstick, chasing sparrows. Or when her wand had chosen her, and every glass pane in that rickety old shop had shattered to pieces. But beginnings were tricky things, differently recounted each and every time, so subject to memory- such that the moment you were looking back from mattered to the beginning almost as much as the moment when you began.

So keeping beginnings aside and sticking to the middle...if life stories were to be remembered, then she might remember quite a lot of things. Like Cissy first being born, a blonde haired faery princess of old clutched in a house elf's arm while their mother slept, and Bella reaching forward to take the pretty doll in. Large grey eyes, spangled with blonde lashes had fluttered open almost as soon as the first human touch was felt, and she remembered crouching at the corner of the fireplace, waiting for her father and rocking her sister to sleep.

Meda of course, was entirely a different story. She was made of stock and stone as she was growing up, hardly a word of disagreement to voice, hardly a tantrum to gain a trifle- yet she always had her way because as Bella wanted to go one direction and Cissy the other, Meda was the peaceful mediator and the veto. She was also one of the best potioneers Bella had ever seen, and the only living person in the world who'd known that her elder sister had hesitated for a minute before entering the pavilion where she was to marry Rodolphus Lestrange, and it was her guiding touch on the arm that had led her down the aisle. Years and years later, the fact would dig at Bellatrix's breast, gnaw at her chest; that even after all that had happened with the Dark Lord and Harry Potter- Andromeda Tonks would be the person in the world who she hated the most.

And then there was Sirius, and Bellatrix loathed him in childhood as well as in Hogwarts, both for being male and so very, very much like her in spirit. Regulus was a shadow that barely lingered on in her memory, just flashes and images of him following at Sirius' tail and sulking in a corner of the common room. And if she'd come to Sirius, she might as well get on with it and mention that little episode with the Sorting Hat in the first year ceremony. It involved a senile old artifact presuming to tell _her _where she rather belonged, as if she didn't know herself better, and the kind of restraint she'd had to exercize not to set fire to the barmy Hat on the spot for even _daring _tosuggestGryffindor. Because apparently she wasn't careful enough to be cunning, and courage and Gryffindor didn't equate exhaustingly limited concepts of morality and goodness and nobility, and pure blooded Black didn't equate Slytherin. Obviously she'd had her way in the end, and the green and silver colours that belonged to _her_; but the incident had misfortunately remained on in her memory, surfacing at the most annoying moments- like this one.

And if she'd finished with this, there was little else left- except Mother's distance and Father's desire for a Black heir. Yes, she was just as proud as him, if not prouder, yes it stung and grated on the nerves that ill-deserving trash like the screeching, classless Aunt Walburga and her son Sirius would seize what was rightfully theirs; but her lack of a prick apparently was too great a failing to allow him to prize anything of what she might do. No, reputation as the most lethal wand-wielder around, top marks in Defense for seven years running, sending first and seventh years alike with their boxers wet and cheeks streaked with tears- no, apparently whatever she might do, she'd remain the daughter who was a dead weight and had to be gotten off of their necks by marrying it...her, off to someone else.

And that was what burned the most of all, what sent her nerves searing and blood boiling- because she couldn't give less of a fuck about her father, but her objective was closely entwined with flourishing and promoting the growth of pureblood society, and sometimes it was this very society which- which compelled them to swish their skirts and do their hair and flutter on arms holding campagne flutes and swoon into the richest bidder's arms at the sight of blood: but fuck it all, Bellatrix liked spilling blood, and if it meant at the cost of making the richest bidder faint of consciousness for the lack of it, so be it. No, she tired and raged at the idea of men offering to lift her trunk and men helping to draw her chair and men stepping back to let her through a door- but when her to-be husband went to meet the Dark Lord, the door was slammed on her face- because she had to wait in the foyer. So she smashed through the gallantry that made her feel so humiliated, and smashed through the door of the private study, sidestepping her gobsmacked fiance's face and bared her forearm to the man with red eyes- asking him to Mark her there and then.

So sometimes people told her she was like to a man, and Bellatrix would never have been anything except a woman, because male ego made one lazy and faulty and pitiable, and the Female Warrior was nothing without her drive. Because while a mother proved that no man could love as fiercely as she did, Bellatrix proved that no man could hate as savagely either.

And so Bellatrix pondered, for the lack of a better word, as the darkness crawled black and slick around her, and dark eyes watched a bubble of blood burst, a little trail of sticky red dribbling out from the corner of his lips, trickling down the line of the jaw that she'd just smashed across with her knuckles just a few seconds ago. The toe of a shoe, leather impeccable and half smeared by mud- dragged along the line of his throat, turning over the cheek with a heel to expose the other, unmarred one, offset by russet hair curling over a ear. Straight, clean lines, closed, paper-thin eyelids, a mediocre mouth...a face that shied on just this side of striking. Such a fool he looked, with his head lolling on the crushed grass like the severed one of a puppet doll's. No, no matter what Frank Longbottom might give the impression of, might want her to believe...she was sure her story wasn't worth knowing at all.

* * *

><p>The stairs were solid oak beneath her feet, barely a creak to warn the wind as she and Barty fleeted up the wood, like shadows best left unremembered. They took the turn into the corridor, Barty immediately making for the end while Bellatrix whirled and blasted open the door nearest to her without sparing a word.<p>

Come on. Come _on._

The world was swirling around her, the patch of floor beneath her feet the only anchor, the only still, safe bit of ground as everything span around her in a frenzied, blurred tornado that wouldn't stop, wouldn't make sense- but the second she stilled in the centre of that room she'd just forced her way into, eyes darting into every corner feveredly; it was too much, the weight of it was too much, like a speeding Hippogryff waiting to slam into her the instant she stopped moving, the second of stagnancy, the second of adrenaline starting to abate and withdraw from her veins _intolerable_. No she had to keep moving, had to keep the magic thundering in her blood, else it would be too late, too late- she _refused _to succumb to this, she would submit to nothing, _nothing_-

"Here!" Barty's voice called out, harsh and triumphant.

It was seconds, bare seconds before she slammed into the room the voice had come from, and there was already a body twitching on the floor, Barty's wand pointing straight down, a frenetic, almost crazed glint in his eyes- but Bellatrix pulled his elbow back with swift efficiency, jerking him around and Barty broke the spell with almost a snarl: the shuddering body on the floorboards coming to a still. Narrowed eyes focused on her, and Bellatrix bit back with double the fury, triple the venom, "Go. I'll handle things here."

"But I was just beginning to have fun..." Barty started, with an almost longing look at the back of the man who lay, breathing heavily against the ground, cheek resting. Bellatrix's cut off was swift and barely tolerant. "He'll be more amenable once we have his son. Now _go_."

Barty left, his footsteps echoing in the corridor beyond them, but not before another faintly mutinous look and mutters; these cretins were starting to get out of hand now, darting above their station, ever since...the Dark Lord had been away, Salazar how she wished to take them in hand and show them how it was really done, but she didn't have the time, or men to spare for that.

So she walked around the man on the floor, heels clicking against the wood, in a position of view to better see his face, a small part of her startled and a little displeased at the thought that frittered past her head- _does he still look the same- _unwilling to acknowledge its existence. She dropped to her haunches, one folded knee resting against the floor, the other vertically up and propping her hand as she lazily dangled her wand between her fingertips, eyes intense. "Grown sluggish in your reactions, haven't you?"

Frank's mouth twisted against the wood, a strange rictus that pretended to be a smile -_yes the same, exactly the same- _and the timbre of his voice throbbed raw and inscrutable against the floorboards. "No. Just fooled into thinking we were safe."

_We. _"Of course. The Charmed Longbottoms. One of the few Wizarding families that had made it past the war without sacrificing a life." Bellatrix's teeth gleamed, hard and cold in her smile, as she leaned lower till one of her black locks drifted across the cheek of his face. Her whisper crawled slow and pernicious into his ear. "But the war isn't really over now, is it?"

Frank laughed, a bare puff of air rustling the dust lying against the wood. "Not in your deluded little heads, no."

And suddenly Bellatrix was in no mood to play, unbreakable fingers moving down to seize that jaw and jerk it above the ground, baring the throat for her wand to jab into, just below the Adam's apple. The wince was barely noticeable, and sienna eyes rested on her face with an almost wearied disdain, as if _he _was the one bearing to put up with her. The black walnut jabbed in tighter, own voice barely audible over the black rage. "Where. Is. The Dark Lord."

"I understand your line of work doesn't exactly allow you the luxury of reading a morning newspaper, but surely even you must have heard." Not cowed. Never cowed. Frank smiled back at her, with an almost caustic pity, though the weariness never left. "Voldemort is dead."

The wand twisted, and the chin in her hand twisted along with it, throat gulping and shuddering. Her fingers let go, and Frank hacked blood onto the floor, the successive coughs seeming to rip out the very vocal cords in his throat. Bellatrix tilted her head, watching the convulsive motions tear through that chest. "I could just as easily torture it out of you, you know."

The bridge of that long, straight nose rested on the floor, and Frank smiled again, the filthy blood traitor, blood staining his teeth red. "Can you really?" He whispered against the floor, then tilted his head in turn to look at Bellatrix through the corner of his eyelids. He looked like he had won. Why did he look like he had won? "Can't you _hear _them, Bellatrix?"

And suddenly she could, muffled pops against the Silencing Charms they'd thrown up over the entire property, scuffles and murmurs just outside the window, like a pack of men trying to surround the place. Frank's eyes glowed, red-riddled as they were, as he achingly lifted his head towards the windowpane, voice hoarse and quiet and entirely victorious. "They're here. They're coming for you. Voldemort is dead, and they're coming for you Bellatrix, for every last one of you who thought you could destroy our peace, destroy what our world runs on; and we wouldn't lift a finger." Then, through the blood, an almost indolent whisper. "You think they'll allow you your wands in Azkaban, Bellatrix?"

And she was choking his throat again, fingertips vicious white points digging against that jaw, and Frank tilted his head to lay his cheek against her palm. "I think I'm sensing a pattern here."

Her lip twitched, and her blood _raged _and his lips moved against her cornified, hardened skin. "Since time is so limited. A question for a question. What d'you think?"

And there it was again, looming up on her like a ghost from the past, the same conundrum. _What could he possibly want from me?_

"Regulus." That voice said, and it was amazing how that cleared her vision, made it narrow sharp and focused and vindictive on the only living occupant of the room except her, right now. Frank's voice was quieter, almost muted. "They say he didn't fight...that he didn't want to be a part of you all...that he backed out and..."

"And the Dark Lord didn't consider him important enough to kill personally?" Yes, _that _was her voice, soft and lulling and so invincibly cruel. Because she wouldn't let him win, wouldn't be anything else than what she _was_. "Yes...he was quite the poor little boy. I finished him myself of course, a paltry task for my Lord." Her nail scratched across his lip, parting skin. "Died like the sniveling little coward he was."

And Frank jerked back, feverish warmth gone, eyes cold and calm and absolutely silenced. Bellatrix smiled at him, canines peeking beneath her lips, blood aflush with triumph and vindication and victory over something she'd never be able to understand- but her heart didn't quiver now, and that was enough. "Where is the Dark Lord."

"Wrong question." Frank's mouth twisted, a bitter little curve, like now the smile was directed at himself.

And two beats passed, two fatal beats past before her heart was thundering again, thumping frenetically against her ribs, pulsing in her throat and wrist and raring to be heard. Her head was heavy, and she could hear the intermittent pounding now, the pulses through the walls- like someone outside trying to take down their wards- and no, this wasn't the time, there wasn't a time, she had the upper hand now which she couldn't relinquish, but this had been in her head since forever, a fatal piece of knowledge locked up inside her chest, a curiosity burning up, and the pounds were getting stronger now...

"That day. In the field." Her voice emerged, without her permission, and that wasn't her voice, not at all. But her eyes fixated on him all the same, intense and unrelenting and almost, almost fearful. "You hit your...you could see."

"No, I couldn't." Frank's words whipped out, and never had that contempt, that scorn, that _hatred _been so blatantly exposed, so unhidden and bare of a smile, or humour, or sarcasm or...anything. Plain and blunt and incisive, like a sledgehammer through the chest. "I had forgotten how. I couldn't see at all." Then those lips twisted in the kind of cruelty that she'd never seen, the kind that didn't suit him, and his voice was a poor, poor mockery of her own- saccharinely, poisonously sweet. "Do you really think you'd have been standing alive in front of me now, otherwise?"

And she was utterly out of control, and her knuckles flew out and backhanded him across the jaw, and his head was thrown to the side- but she seized it again, bringing it face to face with hers, eyes bare centimetres away, closer than it had ever been. Her voice was furious, incensed, and strangely, strangely breaking at the edges. "Liar." She breathed, and brought her wand up to point sideways, straight at his forehead. "_Liar_."

And those plain, peasantly, just this side of striking features smiled, a last time, overcome by the pallor of exhaustion. She could hardly hear him over the thundering footsteps on the staircase, but Frank's eyes were enough. "You have to mean them, you know. You have to really want to cause pain. Righteous anger won't help for long..."

"Never meant it more." She said, and Frank closed his eyes. He almost looked content, this way, the dwindling light of the sunset casting his features gold. The most precious of all metals. "_Crucio._"

* * *

><p>So years and years later, when they came for her, a thin, emaciated, shell of what she'd been, rotting away in cold stone cells...she was ready.<p>

She didn't take anyone's support as she limped through the corridors, feet bare, right leg putrid and gone almost numb with the gangrene. She didn't rush out of the corridors, shoot gleeful taunts at the dead bodies of the guards, dance around in the courtyard where the skin used to be flayed off her back every night. She didn't even gasp much, at the first kiss of free air against her cracked, salt-encrusted lips when her legs first unsteadily emerged from the gateway of Azkaban prison, a lone figure upon the black rock that existed despite it all, surviving in the torrentious storms of the North Sea crashing down on its shores.

Instead, she lifted her arms out to the wind, high and high beyond her shoulders, like a seagull starting to take flight, and felt the fog twist and entwine around her bare skin. There, she opened her eyes and smiled- and watched something like her mind fleet away on the lonely rocks, tripping amongst the sea birds, delve into the black waters.

Sight was such an overrated thing anyway.

_~fin~_


End file.
